Missouri secretary of state rejects referendum on new congressional map

Signature drive passed 300,000; Hoskins cited constitutional bar

Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins on Tuesday declared void a citizens’ petition that sought a statewide November referendum on the state’s new congressional map, ruling on the day Missouri voters went to the polls for primaries being conducted under the new districts. The Republican secretary of state said the number of signatures collected did not matter because, in his words, “challenging a congressional map is unconstitutional under Missouri law.”

People Not Politicians Missouri, the group that organized the referendum drive, submitted more than 300,000 signatures. In a statement, Richard von Glahn, the group’s executive director, said Hoskins was “making a last desperate attempt to silence the people’s voice in Missouri” and asserted the petition carried more than enough signatures to qualify. The group said it would contest the decision in court.

Local election officials reviewed the signatures’ validity over the months after they were submitted in December and approved significantly more than the roughly 111,000 needed to qualify the referendum for the ballot. Hoskins waited until the last day allowed under state law to announce his decision, a move that let the new districts remain in use in the meantime.

The rejection followed months of signals that Hoskins was likely to reject the petition. He asked a federal court last fall to block the petition from being submitted, arguing that congressional redistricting is not subject to a referendum under the U.S. and Missouri constitutions. A judge dismissed the lawsuit as premature, noting in a December ruling that Hoskins had the authority to reject the petition himself if he considered it unconstitutional. When Missouri candidates began filing for office in February, Hoskins said they were doing so under the new districts and told the Associated Press that “the referendum process was never meant to be used for redistricting.”

The map now in use dramatically reshapes the Kansas City-based Fifth Congressional District, held by longtime Democratic Representative Emanuel Cleaver, stretching it into rural central Missouri to give the district a Republican tilt. Republicans already hold six of Missouri’s eight congressional seats and hope to gain another under the redrawn lines.

Hoskins also rejected a separate proposed ballot measure that would have barred the legislature from making it harder to qualify citizen initiatives for the ballot or approve them at an election. The amendment also would have required an 80% vote in both the house and senate to amend or reverse voter-approved initiatives, replacing the current simple majority. Supporters submitted thousands of signatures, but Hoskins said the petition violated a constitutional prohibition against rolling multiple subjects and sections of the constitution into a single amendment. The Respect Missouri Voters coalition said it would take legal action to get the amendment on the ballot. Bob Johnson, a coalition member and former Republican state senator, said, “This brazen disregard for the will of the people is exactly why the people of Missouri came together to gather signatures … because we are sick of these games in Jefferson City.”

For both the redistricting referendum and the citizen-initiative measure, Hoskins released opinions from the Republican attorney general, Catherine Hanaway, laying out the rationale for his decisions.

Missouri was the second Republican-led state, after Texas, to respond to Trump’s call last year to redraw congressional districts to the GOP’s advantage in hopes of holding the party’s slim House majority in the midterms. The effort gained additional steam when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a majority-Black congressional district in Louisiana in late April, prompting Republicans in several southern states to also redraw districts with large minority populations. Republicans estimate they could win as many as 16 additional seats from new House maps enacted in eight states — Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama — while Democrats think they could win up to six additional seats from new districts in California and Utah. Nearly 145 million people, about two of every five U.S. residents, live in states with new congressional districts for this election, and additional states are considering redrawing before the 2028 elections. Maryland lawmakers voted Tuesday to place an amendment on November’s ballot that could pave the way for mid-decade redistricting there.

Missouri’s mid-decade effort already ranks among the most litigated redistricting battles nationally, triggering about a dozen lawsuits over the past year. If a court orders Hoskins to place the redistricting referendum on the ballot, the consequences for the 2026 elections remain unresolved: whether candidates who win Tuesday’s primaries would be allowed to continue running under the new districts in November while voters simultaneously decide whether those districts can be used in future elections, whether candidates would run in different districts for the general election than were used in the primaries, or whether courts would order a do-over of the congressional primaries using the state’s prior districts.

Voters ultimately will determine whether the new districts perform as intended, and Republicans face broader headwinds even with the redrawn maps. The president’s party historically has lost congressional seats in midterm elections, and Trump’s approval ratings could provide an extra hurdle for Republican candidates.