Disagreements between local election officials and Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins continued unabated Friday over the status of which congressional district map will be used in this year’s elections.
The 30 counties where voters have been switched to new districts under the gerrymandered map approved last year must update the district assignments before they can prepare for the Aug. 4 primary.
While one county clerk, Brianna Lennon of Boone County, has said she won’t update the lists until Hoskins rules on the sufficiency of a petition seeking a referendum on the new map, others say they can’t because Hoskins hasn’t done the work needed to accept the new assignments in the Missouri Centralized Voter Registration system.
St. Charles County Elections Director Kurt Bahr, a Republican and former state lawmaker, said early in the afternoon Friday that he has been prepared to upload his new assignments into the system but it wasn’t ready to accept them. St. Charles County was split between the 2nd and 3rd districts in the redistricting plan approved in 2022 but is entirely within the 3rd District in the map passed last year.
Lennon, in a text to The Independent, said she received an email at 4:15 p.m. Friday that the database was ready to accept voter lists assigned to the map Hoskins intends to use for the primary election.
Like Lennon, Bahr wants Hoskins to rule on the petitions before the Aug. 4 statutory deadline. That is the same day as the primary election and, according to a Missouri Supreme Court opinion issued last Tuesday, a decision that the petitions have enough signatures to force a vote would retroactively suspend the measure as of Dec. 9, the day the signatures were submitted.
Hoskins has been operating his office as though the bill took effect Dec. 11 and accepted candidate filings for the primary using those districts. But if the measure is suspended, Bahr said, the districts would revert to the ones used in 2022 and 2024.
Bahr said he simply wants certainty. If Hoskins waits, the primary results could be invalidated because the elections occur in districts that do not legally exist. And any decision Hoskins makes, Bahr said, will be tested in court.
“We need the secretary of state to make a decision so the courts would give us a decision on which map is in effect,” Bahr said. “We don’t want to have confusion as well as a potential lawsuit if we are going from one election to another election with a different map.”
Bahr favors the 2025 map because it gives the GOP an opportunity to win seven of Missouri’s eight congressional districts. But as an elections official, he said he values smooth operations of the election over partisan advantage.
“I have been in favor of the 7-1 map,” he said, “but as much, I am in favor of the same map for both elections.”
The partisan goal of the new map is to oust 5th District U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Kansas City Democrat, by splitting Kansas City and adding voters in 14 counties along the Missouri River.
The district that elected Cleaver to his 11th term in 2024 included most of Kansas City and a portion of Jackson and Clay counties outside the city.
On Friday morning, Hoskins held a news conference with state Sen. Rick Brattin, one of five candidates for the 5th District Republican nomination, to denounce Lennon and argue that the new map is the only one that local election authorities should be preparing to use.
The referendum petition, which the political action committee People Not Politicians says had 305,968 signatures, must have signatures from registered voters equal to 5% of the vote for governor in six of the districts. By tracking the reports from county election authorities, received by Hoskins’ office, the PAC has reported that it made the threshold and more, with 119% to 159% of the minimum in six districts.
Supporters of the referendum held a rally outside the building that houses Hoskins’ office. About 50 people held signs and numbers that spelled out 305,968 while chanting “do your job.”
Hoskins said he does not intend to issue his decision until he must under the law. There are signatures still being checked, he said, and once checked, the petitions must be reviewed for duplicate signatures.
“I’m going to use the entire time that I have possible in order to review those signatures, let the county clerks do their job and certify the signatures and then begin my certification process,” Hoskins said.
The voter database will be ready to accept submissions from local election officials next week, he said.
“I’m going to be the one that actually goes into the software and makes those changes that opens that next step up in the process for our local election authorities,” Hoskins said.
Lennon must comply with his directive to use the new maps, he said.
“I take election integrity and election fraud very, very seriously,” Hoskins said.
Brattin went further, saying Attorney General Catherine Hanaway or Boone County Prosecuting Attorney Roger Johnson needs to intervene with Lennon.
“We have to push back on lawlessness and chaos,” Brattin said. “If we allow every election authority to do whatever that hell they want to do, then we need to do everything in accordance with the law to punish those that are going to enact chaos.”
Richard von Glahn, executive director of People Not Politicians, agrees with Lennon and Bahr that the Tuesday court decision created uncertainty that only Hoskins can resolve.
“I find it very surprising that the attorney general can quote the Supreme Court that way and say, therefore, I say the map is in effect,” von Glahn said. “That is just a ridiculous statement.”
The court decision means the map should not be used because the bill never went into effect, von Glahn said.
“The Supreme Court, in their unanimous decision, made it clear that it is not just his decision that decides this,” he said. “It is his decision, and the completion of judicial review of that decision, that will answer the question as to whether or not the map has been suspended.”
In an interview Friday, Lennon said she has all the materials prepared to reassign Boone County voters. Under the new map, Boone County is split between the 3rd and 5th districts. During the 2022 and 2024 elections, the county was split between the 3rd and 4th districts.
If the deadlines for preparing the primary ballot arrives without any decision from Hoskins, Lennon said, she will upload the data to the central system because, like Bahr, she values a smoothly run election.
That she said, assumes Hoskins has the system ready in time.
But until the deadline arrives, she said, the charge that she has violated some law is wrong.
“They are accusing me,” Lennon said, “of doing something or not doing something that it is impossible to do.”
This was first published by the Missouri Independent, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization covering state government, politics and policy, and is reprinted with permission.