President Donald Trump demanded that Republican-led states redraw their congressional districts mid-decade because he expects he’s in trouble for the midterms.
Missouri Republicans obliged, gerrymandering Kansas City to dilute the voting power of Black voters and get representation of Missouri’s 40% Democratic voters down to 12.5% of congressional seats.
And yet, Republicans face a serious obstacle in their attempt to move the goalposts for our authoritarian president -– the Missouri Constitution.
For over a century, we have had the right to enact and reject legislation via ballot initiative. The group People Not Politicians (who I have volunteered with) collected over 300,000 signatures to get a referendum on the November ballot allowing Missourians to approve or reject the new congressional map.
Missouri Republicans have long sought to thwart ballot initiatives by scheming and lying. But their crusade to stop the gerrymandering referendum through delay and deception has been particularly aggressive and legally incoherent.
Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’ ballot summary attempted to mislead voters into believing the new map would be reversing a gerrymander rather than implementing one. He went on to claim the new boundaries “keep more cities and counties intact, are more compact and better reflects statewide voting patterns.”
People Not Politicians sued to get a more accurate ballot summary. In a strange turn of events, Hoskins admitted that calling the original maps gerrymandered and protective of incumbent politicians was biased. However, he continues to argue his remaining descriptions are fair, despite the fact that some of the new districts divide cities and counties and some are less compact.
And a map designed to reduce Democratic representation to 12.5% does not better reflect statewide voting patterns. Furthermore, none of those claims are in the bill he is purporting to summarize.
What Hoskins did get right is stating in his summary that the map created by lawmakers in September would “repeal Missouri’s existing congressional plan” and “replace it with new congressional boundaries.” That language was not challenged.
It directly contradicts Hoskins’ new position that the new map is already in effect.
Hoskins wrote his summary prior to adopting the novel and nonsensical claim that the gerrymandered map went into effect while referendum signatures were being verified. Because of that shift, candidates have begun filing for office under the gerrymandered map.
But it’s longstanding law that once signatures are submitted to refer a law to the ballot, that law is suspended while the state determines whether the measure qualifies and, if it does, until voters decide whether to approve or reject it. That is the whole point of the referendum process: to stop a law from taking effect unless and until the public ratifies it.
The new map cannot logically govern the very election in which voters are being asked whether it should exist at all.
The contradiction between Hoskins’ ballot summary and his later claim about which map is in effect is a symptom of the state’s shotgun approach to blocking voters from exercising their constitutional right to approve or disapprove legislation. It has been one outlandish legal claim after another across 10 lawsuits.
Attorney General Catherine Hanaway brought a federal case on behalf of the legislature to block People Not Politicians from even turning in the signatures, claiming the referendum violates the federal and state constitutions. A U.S. District Court judge dismissed the case, explaining that if the state really believes that, the remedy is for Hoskins to issue a certificate of insufficiency and declare the referendum ineligible for the ballot.
But Hoskins doesn’t want to do that just yet because once he does, his decision can be litigated — and he is trying to run out the clock.
Hoskins also refused to send a third of the signatures collected to local election officials for verification, claiming they were invalid because they were collected too early. Yet open records requests obtained by People Not Politicians appear to show there are enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot even without the signatures Hoskins is withholding.
Still, Hoskins refuses to make a sufficiency determination.
Citizens shouldn’t have to deal with this carnival of bad faith every time they seek to exercise their rights to the referendum.
Other attempts to block the referendum have included Hanaway suing a signature gathering firm on the basis of the fantastically implausible claim that they trafficked undocumented immigrants to gather signatures, as well as seeking sanctions against a lawyer for People Not Politicians on the basis of the false claim that he — get this — changed the legal position he argued in court.
The state’s lawfare against voter initiatives requires a lot of time and tax dollars, and the efforts often ultimately fail. So now the Republican super majority has put Amendment 4 on the ballot to make it impossible to amend the state Constitution via initiative petition.
These endless attempts to deceive and delay are not just politics — they are a scorched earth attack on democracy. Our elected officials take an oath to faithfully uphold the law. Instead, they have shown themselves determined to subvert it.