Quote what you delete.

The rule guarantees the quote is present; it does not stop a drafter from wrapping it in 300 words of salesmanship. A word limit fixes that, when it is aimed at the right half of the question:

Floor for the disclosure, ceiling for the pitch. A cap that excludes the quotation can never squeeze it out; a cap that includes it defeats the requirement by arithmetic and must be refused, which is what subdivision 4 of section 204D.151 guards against.

The statute can be repealed, or overridden in daylight under subdivision 5, by any future legislature. The permanent form is an amendment to Article IX, Section 1, the article that governs amendments. It must itself go to the voters, so it is the second step, not the first:

Note the self-test: this amendment only adds language, so its own ballot question passes its own rule with nothing to quote. And its consequence clause is self-executing in the strongest sense: a concealing question doesn't just risk a lawsuit, it voids the ratification.

For the staff attorney who has to defend every word. Each choice, and what it's protecting against.

1. Verbatim quotation, no materiality filter. Any filter ("material," "substantive," "key provisions") hands someone discretion over what voters see, and whoever holds that discretion is where the game moves next. Under this draft the only rooms for judgment anywhere in the section are the conforming-changes test in subdivision 3(c) and the express-reference test in subdivision 3(d), and both rooms are closets; everywhere else the only question a court faces is: are the words there or not. That is also why League of Women Voters v. Ritchie stops protecting concealment. Courts defer there because "misleading" has no standard; this section supplies one that requires no judgment to apply.
2. The sentence as the unit of quotation (subd. 1). Without a stated unit, a one-comma amendment quotes either a bare comma or an undefined amount of context, and either answer reintroduces discretion. The complete sentence is the unit because sentence boundaries in the constitutional text are objective: change any part, quote the whole sentence as it reads on filing day. The worked example grows by a lead-in and a tail and becomes more readable, not less; a mid-sentence fragment has no subject.
3. The label line and the fixed anatomy (subd. 2). Presence is not prominence. Without this subdivision, a drafter complies by weaving the quoted words invisibly into sales copy. As drafted, every compliant question has the same three-part shape: the question, then a paragraph holding only the thirteen fixed introductory words, like an unbolded title, then the quotation, and nothing after it. Each requirement is binary: the label paragraph contains no other words or it does; the quotation starts as a new paragraph or it doesn't; language follows the quotation or it doesn't. The no-trailing-language rule stops a drafter from resuming the pitch below the quotation so that voters mark the ballot with the sales copy freshest in mind; instead, the last words a voter reads are the constitution's own. The mandatory citation gives every quoted passage its address, so a voter or reporter can pull the section and read the whole thing. Paragraph breaks carry the structure because every ballot system, printer, and reproduction supports them; bold face on "remove or change" is layered on top, because a voter who reads "This amendment would" and jumps to the quoted paragraph draws exactly the wrong conclusion — that the amendment would enact the words quoted, when it would strike them. An inverted disclosure argues for the amendment, which is worse than no disclosure at all, and bold is the one emphasis Minnesota ballots demonstrably print: Minn. R. 8250.1810, subp. 11 already requires the amendment title, the words "Yes" and "No," and a dividing line in bold face on the same ballot, while underline, italic, and strikethrough appear nowhere in the rule. Because typography is the one requirement here that a printer rather than a drafter controls, subdivision 6 says expressly that a missing bold face does not make a question uncertifiable — the emphasis is a printing duty, never a ballot-blocker, and the appending cure could not fix it anyway. The subdivision also says expressly how its requirements carry into audio presentation (reading order, where bold has no meaning and the visual-layout requirements drop out by their own terms) and into translations (label and quotation included), so no literal reading can make an accessible or translated ballot noncompliant.
4. "Any of its words or punctuation" (subd. 3(b)). Pure textual trigger, no "legal effect" test, because a legal-effect test is a judgment call and judgment calls are the vulnerability. A comma can change meaning; if you change a comma, quote the provision. The cost of over-inclusion falls on the amendment's drafter, in public, which is self-punishing in exactly the right direction.
5. The conforming-changes carve-out (subd. 3(c)), written as a prohibition. The one narrow exception, and the residual judgment we accept: "made necessary solely by" a quoted change. Without it, opponents manufacture absurdity ("your rule requires quoting forty renumbered cross-references"). And it says "must not," not "need not," because permission is itself an exploit: a drafter allowed to quote conforming noise would quote all forty trivial corrections voluntarily and drown the one deletion that matters. The prohibition keeps the quotation block pure signal. It cannot hide anything real, because a change with independent effect is not "made necessary solely by" a quoted change and so must be quoted under subdivision 1.
6. The express-reference trigger (subd. 3(d)) and the priority sentence (subd. 3(e)). The cheapest evasion of a deletion rule is to delete nothing: add a new section that overrides the old one — by a notwithstanding clause, a priority verb, or a definition ("as used in section 8, 'net interest and dividends' means…") — and the old words become a museum piece without one of them changing. Subdivision 3(d) makes every version of that move quotable while staying mechanical: if the added language names an existing provision, that provision is quoted, whatever verb carries the override. Over-inclusion (a benign cross-reference triggers quoting) costs the amendment's own drafter, which is the direction this bill always chooses. An override aimed at the constitution generally, naming nothing, cannot be quoted — there is no "it" to quote — so subdivision 3(e) requires the one thing that can be said mechanically: a fixed sentence telling the voter the amendment takes priority over whatever conflicts with it. What remains outside the section is drafting that creates the conflict silently, naming nothing and claiming nothing; see the boundary note at the end of this list.
7. Quoted words exempt from all length limits (subd. 4). Florida caps summaries at 75 words; HF 3900 deletes 76. In any capped regime the quotation requirement dies by arithmetic. This subdivision makes the rule cap-proof, including against caps invented later as a "reasonable compromise."
8. The express-statement clause (subd. 5). No statute binds a future legislature, and HF 3900 itself shows the move: write the question into session law and argue the specific-and-later law silently beats the general one (the implied-repeal doctrine). This clause is a recognized drafting device for exactly that problem; the model is the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. §2000bb-3(b), which subjects later statutes to its rule "unless such law explicitly excludes such application by reference to this chapter." Courts treat such clauses as at least a strong interpretive default against implied override. It can't prevent an exemption; it forces one into the open. An exempting law must name this section, whose title puts "quotation of constitutional language" into the exempting bill's own text, and must do it in a stand-alone section containing nothing else, so the exemption can never hide inside an omnibus provision: it must stand alone on the page where anyone can point to it. The clause deliberately stops short of scripting a confession sentence for the future law to recite: dictating the rhetoric of future statutes is unenforceable entrenchment rather than an interpretive default, argumentative phrasing inside statute text reads as a stunt to the staff attorneys who decide whether a bill is serious, and required natural-language phrasing invites litigation over near-miss wordings, reintroducing the judgment calls this section exists to eliminate. The law stays neutral; the scorecard does the translating.
9. The certification chokepoint, the cure, and the clock (subd. 6). The remedy is completion, not blockage, and it does not wait to be asked: before certifying any amendment question, the secretary of state runs the one check this section allows — is the question presented as subdivisions 1 to 3 require — and completes a noncompliant one by appending the label and the quotation, every word of which is determined by the amendment's own text. Nothing is authored, everything is transcribed, so the cure never puts an official in the framing business that Limmer v. Ritchie reserves to the legislature; and because the session law's own question appears untouched with the disclosure appended below it, both enactments are given full effect and the later-law-wins argument loses its footing. The §204B.44 petition — converted by this section from "the question is misleading" (a judgment courts refuse to make) to "the question omits required text" (a fact) — is now the check on the secretary, running 30 days from certification, whatever the petition is titled and whatever law it is brought under. Paragraph (b) says that expressly rather than leaving it to inference: the cheapest way to defeat an enforcement case is to defeat it on the caption, and a court that recharacterizes a mandamus petition as something the statute does not reach never has to decide whether the words were left out. Every ballot question passes the chokepoint no matter when a special session acts, so no timing play can carry a noncompliant question to the printer; the absentee-voting cutoff then protects ballots already in voters' hands, and if a late completion ever forces reprinting, subdivision 7 puts the cost on the state, not the counties. The filing anchor for the clocks in this section is the deposit of the proposing act with the secretary of state; the Revisor supplies the statutory cite at introduction.
10. 2028 effective date. The first general election the section could reach in any case, stated in the text so no one has to infer it — and so no one can claim the bill targets a pending measure.
11. Why the quotation, not a strikethrough markup, on the ballot itself. The redline format is right for documents and wrong for ballots. Accessible voting machines read questions aloud, and speech has no strikethrough: struck text is either read as live text or skipped, both worse than the disease. County ballot systems guarantee uniform type, not typography, so a rule depending on a strikethrough glyph surviving every printer, reprint, and newspaper reproduction is no longer self-executing. The layer that does have real typography gets the redline as a requirement: section 2 of the bill adds a subdivision to section 204D.15 putting the full marked-up text — deletions struck, additions underlined, added sections in full — in the sample ballot, where every change is visible without costing the ballot itself a word.
12. The price in words, stated rather than hidden. In Minnesota a blank vote on a constitutional amendment counts as a no, and longer questions get skipped more. The quotation therefore charges a real cost — 119 added words in the worked example — and charges it only to amendments that delete, modify, or override existing text; amendments that only add pay nothing on the ballot, though their full text appears underlined in the sample ballot under section 2 of the bill. Two things about that cost. It scales with the size of what is being taken out of the constitution, which is the right variable for it to scale with. And it cuts against gaming: a drafter who pads or floods a quotation to bury a deletion lengthens their own question and raises their own skip rate. The burden of noise lands on whoever makes the noise.
13. The appropriation, priced honestly. Subdivision 7's cost is contingent and, in the expected case, zero: the chokepoint completion happens before ballots print, and reimbursement is owed only if a court-ordered correction lands after county preparation. A finance committee that wants to cap the appropriation or convert it to a biennial line item can do so without touching the design; the disclosure rule does not depend on the money.
14. The boundary, stated plainly. This section protects words, not operativeness, and no mechanical rule can do more without a legal-effect test — the judgment call whose absence is the section's entire enforcement theory. What remains outside it: an amendment that conflicts with existing text silently, naming nothing and claiming nothing, leaving courts to sort out which provision governs; a two-step that adds an override in one election and deletes the then-dead words in a later one; a global priority clause, which subdivision 3(e) can only flag, not quote; and salesmanship wrapped around a fully compliant quotation. Those live where judgment lives — the scorecard's criteria. (Each, though, leaves its full added text underlined in the sample ballot under section 2 of the bill: beyond the ballot rule's reach, but not invisible.) And one designed use of subdivision 5 should be said before someone asks: a wholesale constitutional revision in the 1974 style, which reorganizes language throughout, is exactly the case for the stand-alone exemption section — the revision act exempts its own question, in daylight, in a section anyone can read, and the voters weigh the revision knowing that. Publishing this boundary is deliberate: the section ends the cheapest class of concealment, and claiming it ends every class is how the gap would eventually be used against it.