Editorial: Map fight shows why Missourians must strengthen ballot initiative process

St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Board, St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Oct 3, 2026

Published in Op Eds

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It took most of the year and three trips to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the citizens of Missouri recently finally won the right they should have had all along: to weigh in on the hyper-gerrymandered new congressional district map the state Legislature foisted upon them in a brazen plot to steal a U.S. House of Representatives seat.

The high court recently issued its third and final smackdown of that plot, ordering state election officials to adhere to a Missouri Supreme Court ruling that says the state’s voters must be allowed an up-or-down vote on the new map before it can go into effect.

That question now will be on Missouri’s Nov. 3 ballot as Proposition A, with a “yes” vote approving the new map and a “no” vote rejecting it. Missourians should strongly reject it.

The whole sorry spectacle should also be an impetus for voters to approve another measure that will be on the same ballot: Amendment 6, which would strengthen the citizen-initiative referendum process and shield voters’ decisions from legislative meddling. If the shenanigans of Missouri officials during the map fight has shown one thing, it’s that they can’t be trusted to act in good faith regarding that process. It must be protected from them.

The effort to re-gerrymander Missouri’s already-gerrymandered map to allow a Republican takeover of one of just two Democratic-leaning districts (out of eight total) was a corrupt exercise from the start.

Gerrymandering is a rotten old bipartisan tradition, but at least it historically has coincided with new census data every 10 years, a constitutionally mandated process.

This wasn’t that. President Donald Trump last year told Missouri and other Republican-controlled states to undertake an unheard-of mid-decade re-gerrymandering for the plainly stated purpose of helping the GOP keep control of the House in the upcoming midterm elections.

Missouri’s Legislature and Gov. Mike Kehoe obediently complied with this norm-busting scheme, drawing a new map to carve up and take over the Kansas City-based Fifth District, currently held by Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver.

Opponents of the new map responded back in December by submitting more than 300,000 signatures, far more than needed to challenge it via referendum. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, as Missouri’s top election official, is statutorily obligated to fairly handle even ballot initiatives he disagrees with. Instead, he violated that obligation with a series of official stunts designed to derail the referendum effort.

Most egregious was his refusal to either accept or reject the signatures until it was too late to put the question on the Aug. 4 primary ballot. Despite specific warnings from the courts that using the new map in that election while a challenge was pending could bring chaos down the road, that’s exactly what happened as a direct result of Hoskins’ intentional foot-dragging.

When Hoskins finally did act on the referendum initiative, it was to unilaterally declare the whole thing unconstitutional. The Missouri Supreme Court unanimously disagreed and ordered the old map put back in place for November while the new map was challenged.

In the legal back-and-forth that followed, Hoskins and Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway repeatedly argued that the new map must be used in November because it had been used in the primaries and switching maps mid-election would cause confusion. To the extent that's true, the confusion is entirely of their own intentional making.

That fact wasn’t lost on the U.S. Supreme Court.

“In the several-month period before the August primary election, the Missouri secretary of state was well aware that conducting the August primary election with the 2025 map carried significant risks,” the court noted in its unsigned decision. “The secretary nonetheless chose to proceed with the 2025 map for the primary.”

It’s the start of a positive outcome that voters can now complete by defeating the new map (Proposition A) in November.

Hoskins played some similar games trying to keep Amendment 6 off the ballot, and he similarly failed. It would confirm the referendum petition process as a fundamental right and make it more difficult for the Legislature to overturn voters’ referendum decisions — an imperious and infuriating affront lawmakers have done (or tried to do) in recent years on issues including the minimum wage, sick leave, Medicaid expansion and more.

Hoskins' personal disdain for the referendum process was clear in an op-ed he wrote for this opinion section earlier this month, in which he derided that entire process as "mob rule."

That kind of arrogance, and the shameless machinations we’ve seen in the map fight, drive home how truly urgent it is to bring this state’s out-of-control partisan power structure to heel. Voters can do that Nov. 3 by voting “no” on Proposition A and “yes” on Amendment 6.

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