BY: RUDI KELLER
Missouri Independent
Roughly 300,000 signatures demanding Missouri’s gerrymandered congressional map be placed on the 2026 ballot were submitted to the secretary of state’s office Tuesday morning — more than two and a half times the number needed.
The political action committee behind the effort, People Not Politicians, called the campaign an “unprecedented show of grassroots power.”
The petition pages filled 691 boxes and, after initial processing, each page will be scanned and images delivered to local election authorities for signature verification, Director of Elections Chrissy Peters said.
Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a first-term Republican, will oversee the verification process. Under the Missouri Constitution, the law establishing new districts will not take effect on Thursday and will remain in limbo until voters can decide its fate at the ballot box or Hoskins determines the signature threshold was not reached.
Several questions swirl around the signatures.
First, Hoskins has previously stated he won’t accept any signatures collected before Gov. Mike Kehoe signed the bill on Sept. 29. That decision impacts around 92,000 signatures.
Testifying in a Cole County courtroom on Monday in a lawsuit challenging Hoskins’ decision, Peters said the cut-off date the office will use is Oct. 14, because that is the day that Hoskins approved the form of the referendum petition.
Signatures before that date will be be separated, scanned for preservation, but not distributed to county election officials for verification until Judge Chris Limbaugh rules on whether Hoskins must accept them, Peters said.
Some pages contain signatures gathered before Oct. 14 and on or after that date, Peters said in an interview Tuesday. How those will be processed is uncertain, she said.
“We were made aware today verbally by the petitioner that there could be mixed pages like that,” Peters said. “So we will make that determination after I have a chance to review it.”
Second, a Trump-appointed federal judge threw out a lawsuit Monday that argued a referendum on redistricting was unconstitutional. In the ruling, the judge said state court was the proper venue if Hoskins believes the referendum violates the constitution. That could set the stage for yet another legal showdown over the power of voters to overturn the actions of the legislature.
Missouri has eight congressional districts, with six currently represented by Republicans.
The 5th District, based in Kansas City and represented by Democratic U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver since 2005, is carved up under the new map with portions attached to the 4th and 6th Districts. Heavily Republican areas stretching along the Missouri River to Boone County would be added to the remaining Kansas City portions.
The intended result is a map where Republicans hold seven of the state’s eight seats.
The day lawmakers passed the new map, People Not Politicians submitted paperwork with the secretary of state’s office for a referendum. Of the 27 times a referendum has been placed on the Missouri ballot, voters have rejected the General Assembly’s actions all but twice — including overturning a congressional map in 1922.
The last time a referendum campaign was deployed was in 2019, when the secretary of state’s office used procedural maneuvers to successfully derail a push to overturn newly-passed restrictions on abortion. The move sparked a lawsuit, and in 2022 the Missouri Supreme Court ruled the laws the secretary of state used to obstruct the citizen-initiated referendum process were unconstitutional.