Bethany Mann has put thousands of miles on her 2014 Toyota RAV4 while campaigning for office in Missouri’s Third Congressional District. The problem for Mann, her opponents, and the hundreds of thousands of voters who live there is that for months, no one has known precisely where the district’s boundaries are.
Missouri jumped last year into the nation’s redistricting wars, pushing through a new congressional map backed by President Trump that would secure an additional Republican House seat in November. The plan has mostly collapsed, leading to a year of legal fights and confusion for voters. The partisan battle reached the Supreme Court last week and spurred a chaotic back-and-forth among the courts that changed the boundaries multiple times within a single hour. For now, the old map, which was adopted in 2022, is back in effect, but Republican candidates are still battling. A hearing in a federal appeals court is set for tomorrow—one day before the state is required to start making absentee ballots available to overseas voters.
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The mayhem in Missouri is the latest example of how uncertain and volatile the midterm elections have become. Republicans started the redistricting battles last year to gain partisan advantage during the midterms, and Democrats quickly followed. Missouri and nine other states have since redrawn their maps. On Monday, the Court blocked a Trump executive order that would have dramatically restricted voting by mail, a decision that Trump called a “big loss for Republicans, and America itself.” Voting-rights groups celebrated the decision, which they say prevents chaos. But with fewer than two months until Election Day, election-related litigation is still winding its way through the courts, and Trump continues to claim that the electoral system is rigged.
“We’re talking about last-minute changes to election infrastructure, which could lead to either confusion or affect the outcome of the election,” Nate Persily, a Stanford University law professor, told me. “And it is a serious problem, particularly in our current context when voter confidence in the election infrastructure has collapsed.”
Missouri’s saga began shortly after the state legislature passed the new, GOP-friendly map at the urging of the White House last September. Opponents seized on a quirk in the state constitution that empowers citizens to petition for a referendum on an act of the state legislature. In December, an advocacy group submitted more than 305,000 signatures asking for a vote before the new map would be put into effect—which would leave the old map in use for the election this fall. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, had until August 4, the state’s primary date, to certify the referendum for November’s ballot.
For months, it’s been unclear which map would actually be used. Democratic candidates, including Mann, told me that they’d stumped through both the new and old versions of their district—a choice that took extra manpower, organizing, and money. Others, including Representative Bob Onder, a Republican whom Mann is challenging, told me that they’d campaigned off of the revised 2025 map.
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“We knew that they were going to be enacting this gerrymandered scheme,” Mann said. “So our strategy, not just in the Third Congressional but as a Democratic Party as a whole, was to beat these congresspeople on any map that they offer.”
But the morning of the primary came, and Hoskins had still not certified the referendum. He directed election administrators to hold the primary under the 2025 map. At 4 p.m. that day, an hour before the referendum deadline, Hoskins rejected the petition on state constitutional grounds. Candidates won their primaries based on the gerrymandered map.
A month later, the situation got even more complex. On September 3, the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously ruled against Hoskins, finding that the referendum petition was legal and should not have been rejected. It ordered the 2022 map to be used in November. Hoskins appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, which rejected his arguments last Tuesday. Thirty minutes later, a federal district judge ruling on a separate lawsuit ordered that the 2025 map must be used in November. Citing that decision, Hoskins announced that Missouri would use the new gerrymandered map—leading the Missouri Supreme Court to threaten him with contempt of court. The U.S. Supreme Court quickly chimed in again and restored the old map, for now; Hoskins was briefly held in contempt for continuing to insist that the 2025 map was valid, but he quickly switched his position to match that of the U.S. Supreme Court. Legal experts told me that it is highly unlikely that the appeals court would change the map again, but as the past two weeks have shown, nothing is certain.
Both sides agree that the situation is a mess. Republicans I spoke with blamed the Missouri Supreme Court for rejecting the 2025 map after it had already been used for a primary. Democrats—and the majority of legal experts I spoke with—blamed Hoskins for waiting until the last available hour to reject the petition, a move that effectively forced the primary to be conducted with the 2025 map, which his party drew up. They said that the arguments should have played out in court months ago. Hoskins disagreed.
“I take my job and oath of office very seriously,” Hoskins told me. “I met that deadline, my constitutional deadline, of August 4. I would say those that don’t like that deadline and want to see that deadline change, they need to contact their lawmaker.”
Some of the federal officials whose seats are on the line are, like voters, trying to figure out what’s going on and who is to blame. Onder, who is suing to reinstate the new map, told me that he and voters “operated on the assumption” that the 2025 map was the correct one. “To the extent this has been thrown into confusion and chaos, the fault is entirely [on] the part of the Missouri Supreme Court.” Representative Emanuel Cleaver, whose seat was supposed to be wiped out by the new map, told me that he had been campaigning “all over the state” over the past few weeks because of his uncertainty about which district he’d be in. “There’s been a fog over the state of Missouri,” Cleaver said. “We are now spending time trying to erase the confusion.”
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The bulk of the work is now in the hands of local election administrators, who are scrambling to prepare for the midterms on a condensed timeframe and with a confused electorate. Kurt Bahr, a Republican and the St. Charles County elections director, told me that he’s printing ballots under the old 2022 map but is preparing contingency plans in case courts once again change which map to use. In Boone County, where about 40 percent of voters would shift into a new district under the 2025 map, the clerk Brianna Lennon has provided a lookup tool so voters can see their districts under both maps. She said that she and her staff have been working to inform voters about what’s happening without causing needless panic.
“These things are always being argued over and fought over by people who don’t have to run the election,” Eric Fey, the Democratic director of elections in St. Louis County, told me. Election administrators, he said, are the “folks that are left holding the bag at the end of the day.”
Last year, Onder posted a clip of a speech in which he recounted speaking with Trump about redistricting. “I said, ‘Mr. President, do you want us to draw you an extra congressional seat in Missouri?,’” Onder said, adding that the state, which voted for Trump by 18 points and has Republican supermajorities in the state legislature, was poised under the old map to send “two progressive Democrats” to Congress. Missouri’s 2025 map aims to net an additional Republican seat in the House by carving Kansas City—long represented by Cleaver—into three districts that extend into rural central Missouri and strongly favor Republicans.
The fate of Independence Boulevard Christian Church, in northeast Kansas City, exemplifies this gerrymandering tactic, known as “cracking.” Under the 2025 map, the church is in one district, the parking lot in another, and a market across the street in a third.
“Before, there already were people who were saying [voting] doesn’t matter; they had already felt disenfranchised,” Mindy Fugarino, the pastor of the church, told me. “I think there are some folks just using this as another reason to disengage.”
The “downward spiral” of extreme partisan gerrymandering over the past year risks disillusioning people, Richard Pildes, a constitutional-law professor at New York University, told me. “It leads to many voters feeling the system is being manipulated, that the system’s rigged,” he said.
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Both Democrats and Republicans in Missouri told me they feel cheated as the map continues to change. St. Charles County Republican Central Committee Chair Bob Eno told me he believes that the state supreme-court ruling took away people’s chances to choose their own representation by shifting the state back to the old map after primary votes had already been cast. Pat Harcourt, who lives in Wright City, initially thought that her Democratic ballot was incorrect for the August primary. But it wasn’t—her address had moved into a different district under the gerrymandered map. “And here I am writing postcards to people, ‘Your vote counts,’” Harcourt told me. “Well, I don’t know. Maybe it counts, but it may not be in your congressional district.” Mitchell Clem, a Republican voter whose district also moved under the new map, told me that he doesn’t like gerrymandering but understands that Missouri is part of a national trend. “We need to fix this,” Clem, who lives in the St. Louis suburb of O’Fallon, said. “It’s just gotten out of hand.”
The drawing of congressional districts has always seemed subjective, and the rules for drawing them have been scrutinized since gerrymandering was first deployed as a political tactic more than 200 years ago. But as partisanship continues to deepen, the rules keep shifting far too late in the process, and voters try, perhaps in vain, just to keep up.
The post An Electoral Mess in Missouri appeared first on The Atlantic.
