A lawsuit filed Wednesday seeks to prevent a proposed constitutional amendment to legalize sports betting in Missouri from appearing on the ballot in November.

The lawsuit, filed in Cole County District Court, argues that the method the Missouri Secretary of State’s office used to certify that the sports betting proposal had collected enough signatures was unconstitutional.

To get on the ballot, proposed ballot initiatives must receive the signatures of 8% of eligible voters in six of the state’s eight congressional districts.

Lawmakers redrawn those districts after the 2020 U.S. Census, but the Secretary of State’s office did not take the new districts into account when calculating whether enough valid signatures had been collected, the lawsuit says. However, it did use current district boundaries to determine where the people who signed the petition lived.

If the count had been based on the current district boundaries, the lawsuit says, the proposal would not have received the required votes in the 1st Congressional District.

The Secretary of State should have calculated the required number of signatures per county, the lawsuit says, by taking the total vote in the 2020 gubernatorial election, multiplying it by 8%, and dividing that total by eight.

In this scenario, the proposal would have had no effect in either the 1st or 5th districts.

The lawsuit also alleges that the Secretary of State’s office deemed some signatures valid that were not admissible in the 1st and 5th districts.

A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry could not immediately be reached for comment.

The sports betting initiative was launched late last year after major sports teams and casino companies were once again blocked from passing legislation. The publicity portion of the campaign was handled by the major professional sports teams, but the money – $6.3 million for the signature campaign – was provided by the two largest online sports betting platforms, FanDuel and DraftKings.

Bill DeWitt III, president of the St. Louis Cardinalscalled Wednesday’s lawsuit “completely unfounded when Missourians came out in droves to sign the petition that will be on the ballot in November.”

If approved by voters this fall, the gambling industry’s profits would be taxed at 10% of the net amount after promotions and other costs. In Kansas, where sports betting was legalized in 2022, a similar tax structure raised $9.8 million on $172 million wagered in June.

The ballot text projects that Missouri will collect up to $28.9 million annually to be spent on education programs.