Lake of the Ozarks Casino Backers Sue to Revive Rejected Ballot Measure

A campaign group dedicated to establishing a commercial casino in Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks filed a lawsuit against Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft Tuesday in a bid to get the issue on the ballot.

Last week, Ashcroft rejected a proposed ballot measure by the group, the Osage River and Gaming Convention (ORGC), because it didn’t have enough valid signatures.

The group claimed it submitted more than 320K signatures — more than enough to meet the ballot threshold — which requires the support of 8% of legal voters in each of two-thirds of the state’s eight congressional districts. Ashcroft said the campaign fell short by 2,031 signatures in the 2nd Congressional District.

‘Mistakes Happen’

In its complaint, the ORGC implies that the Secretary of State’s Office may have been mistaken and claims to have identified more than 2,500 valid signatures, which it says were wrongly rejected.

“Verifying every signature on multiple initiative petitions this summer has been a very long process for election officials and we realize mistakes happen,” the ORGC said in a statement.

ORGC has always been confident their initiative petition contained a sufficient number of valid signatures from legal voters to qualify for placement on the November 5, 2024 general election ballot and are now asking the Court to do so,” the statement continued.

Signatures can be rejected for numerous reasons, such as because the signee isn’t actually registered to vote, they entered false information, or they signed the petition more than once.

Bankrolled by Bally’s

The ORGC, which is bankrolled by Bally’s and local property developer Gary Pruitt, would ask the electorate whether Missouri’s constitution should be amended to expand casino gaming. Currently, it only permits casinos on the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. The proposal would create one casino license for the Lake of the Ozarks.

If it ever gets off the ground, the proposed project will create 500 construction jobs and 700 permanent jobs once it opens, according to the ORGC. Tax revenues from the casino would go to early childhood literacy programs in public schools.

Eyes On the Ozarks

The ORGC isn’t the only entity with its eyes on a casino in the popular tourist destination. The Osage Nation, which owns seven casinos in Oklahoma, has applied to the Department of the Interior to have land in the area taken into trust for the purpose of building the state’s first tribal gaming facility.

To approve the application for a casino so far from the tribe’s official reservation, the Interior Department will have to agree that the tribe has ancestral ties to the region.

The Osage Nation’s historical lands once encompassed most of what is now Missouri, and the tribe gave its name to the nearby Osage River. Nevertheless, the application could take years to process.

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