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• Supporters of tobacco tax file lawsuit 

Supporters of a measure that would more than quadruple Missouri's cigarette tax filed a lawsuit Monday challenging a decision by Secretary of State Matt Blunt to keep the issue off the November ballot.

Citizens for a Healthy Missouri, which filed the lawsuit in Cole County Circuit Court, alleges Blunt's office provided outdated and mislabeled copies of the state's centralized voter registration database, which the group used to verify the signatures it collected.

"The secretary of state's office is the only official source of statewide voter registration information. They are required by statute to keep it accurate and up-to-date. Therefore, we rightly believed we were working with reliable information," said Brad Ketcher, a spokesman for the group. "It would be wrong to keep this proposal from the ballot because of their error."

Ketcher said it didn't appear anything intentional was done by Blunt to mislead the group, which describes itself as a broad-based coalition made up of health professionals, public health advocates, business organizations and others.

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