Missouri Supreme Ct Throws Out New Congressional Maps — After Primaries Already Held
MO AG: “Never before in American history has a court overturned a congressional map after a primary and before a general election. This unprecedented decision clearly violates federal law and has thrust our state into a full‑fledged constitutional crisis.”
This may be the first time a court has thrown out a congressional map after the primaries already were held using those maps. That would require a general election in different districts than the primaries. That is what the Missouri Supreme Court just did.
The Attorney General vows to go to SCOTUS:
Never before in American history has a court overturned a congressional map after a primary and before a general election. This unprecedented decision clearly violates federal law and has thrust our state into a full‑fledged constitutional crisis.
Our office will move immediately to seek relief from SCOTUS. We are confident that the federal courts will not allow every Missouri voter to be disenfranchised—which is what today’s decision does.
“A republic, if you can keep it.” – Benjamin Franklin
Never before in American history has a court overturned a congressional map after a primary and before a general election. This unprecedented decision clearly violates federal law and has thrust our state into a full‑fledged…
— Attorney General Catherine L. Hanaway (@AGCHanaway) September 3, 2026
The issue is whether a referendum against the map change had to be held before the final maps could be determined. So the Court ruled that despite the primaries being held, the referendum had to be on the ballot in November and only then could the new districts be used (for the next election). From The NY Times:
The Missouri Supreme Court cleared the way on Thursday for the state’s voters to decide in November whether to keep new congressional district boundaries redrawn to benefit Republicans.
The judges ruled unanimously that the old map would be used in the November general election, a decision that at least temporarily thwarts Republicans’ efforts to pick up a House seat in the Kansas City area.
Missouri’s primary election was held last month using the redrawn boundaries, and state election officials had vowed to forge ahead with using those borders in November unless explicitly told otherwise.
The seven judges did exactly that in their ruling, which came a day after oral arguments in the case and less than a week before the deadline to finalize the November ballot….
The court did not specify how candidates would be determined for a general election using the older borders since congressional nominees were selected using the redrawn ones….
Though the Missouri Supreme Court determined that it was legal for legislators to redraw the map, it also found that residents opposed to the boundaries had acted within the law when they submitted hundreds of thousands of signatures seeking a statewide referendum on the issue. The judges found that the redrawn map should have been suspended until a referendum could be held.
You can read the full Opinion here.
Under Missouri law, a referendum stays enforcement of an enacted law. So here, the referendum is staying the 2026 map. But the elections have already started. The current map has candidates running. Now those candidates must run in *different* districts than their primary win pic.twitter.com/KYHp2TOPIq
— Eric W. (@EWess92) September 3, 2026
In a lengthy footnote, the Court blames the Republicans for the problems caused by delay:
It’s not at all clear SCOTUS would take the case because it is a state court interpretation of the state constitution – similar to the Virginia case. BUT the big difference here is that the primaries were held in a federal election using different districts.
We shall see.
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So the next time a judge says that a badly needed redistricting can’t take place because “it’s too close to the election now,” throw this into their faces.
But this isn’t a redistricting. On the contrary, the court is saying the redistricting was put on hold by the referendum, so the election has to use the old map from before the redistricting. And that the secretary created this mess in the first place by delaying the whole process. If he believed the referendum was constitutionally defective then he shouldn’t have verified the signatures; and if he was going to verify them then he should have held the primary on the old boundaries.
The purpose of redistricting is to redraw the boundaries of congressional districts to determine what voters will elect their congressional representatation. That was done and candidate representatives were chosen in the redrawn district primaries. Those newly created boundaries have now been essentially redrawn by judicial edict. If that isn’t redistricting in its most basis sense than nothing really is,
But as soon as the referendum was certified, the redistricting became invalid. That’s how it works. If the legislature passes a law and enough signatures are submitted and verified to trigger a referendum then the law is not valid until and unless the voters approve it. So the redistricting is not a law, and can’t become law until the referendum is held. There’s nothing the court can do about that; that’s the law.
The secretary should have made up his mind early on and picked one thing: either start verifying the signatures and hold the primary on the old boundaries, or refuse to verify the signatures and hold it on the new ones.
You’re exalting legal form over substance. In reality, this judge, by judicial fiat, has rewritten the electoral lines in a manner completely inconsistent with the reality of the redrawn districts the present candidates were chosen to represent. That’s redistricting in its most basic sense.
The law is the law. And as you will surely have seen if you bothered reading the post, “HB 1 is not the law and has never been the law. There is only one valid congressional redistricting in effect” — the one the legislature passed in 2022. That’s indisputable; the certification of the referendum means HB 1 is not the law. So how could the court possibly allow the election to go ahead on a map that is not and has never been the law?
This is all the secretary of state’s doing. Blame him. Did he do it on purpose? I don’t know, but either way it’s on him.
“If the law supposes that,’ said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, “the law is a ass–a idiot. If that’s the eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is, that his eye may be opened by experience–by experience.” ~ Oliver Twist
You are wrong, milhouse. The Missouri SoS never certified those signatures.
https://redistrictingonline.org/2026/08/06/missouri-secretary-of-state-rejects-redistricting-referendum-on-constitutional-grounds/
He verified the signatures. He refused to certify the referendum, but not on the grounds that the signatures were invalid or hadn’t been verified. Having decided last year that the referendum would be invalid regardless of the signatures, he could have refused to verify them, but he chose not only to do so but to insist on verifying each and every signature rather than merely a sample, as was in his power. This deliberately delayed the whole process. Now that the signatures have been verified, the referendum is on — and the court could not have reached that conclusion any earlier, because the secretary deliberately held it up.
They keep telling me that there isn’t a scintilla of evidence that our elections are rife with fraud.
Yet, these curious things keep happening over and over again (and always in the same direction).
I wish I had such luck playing powerball.
I’d buy you all dinner.
“BUT the big difference here is that the primaries were held in a federal election using different districts.”
Yup. I have been disenfranchised.
The new map put me in a different district for the August primary, and I voted for the candidate I wanted to represent me in Congress.
This back stabbing court ruling throws me back into my old district to vote for a candidate I did not have a say in placing on the ballot.
I have been disenfranchised.
Bad, SCOMO, bad. WTH were these guys smoking?
You haven’t been disenfranchised. You get to vote in November. Who says you’re entitled to a say in who the candidates are? Nothing in the constitution requires primaries at all.
God’s Holy Trousers, milhouse. You’re simply wearing a Tucker Carlson mask and trolling everyone.
No, you’re an idiot. There is NO RIGHT to choose a party’s candidates. Parties may choose to grant you that “right”, but they may also choose not to.
We had to do something similar in Alabama BUT that was in June. We invalidated the impacted primary results then held a subsequent set of primaries only for those districts. It wasn’t great but wasn’t all that disruptive. Candidates had time to campaign in the districts and voters had time to evaluate the candidates. It didn’t impact the entire State.
The CT here seems hell bent on creating chaos. IMO this is the legal equivalent of walking down the sidewalk and tossing a hand grenade into an open window …then just keeping on a walking merrily along without a care in the world for the destructive chaos they unleashed, leaving someone else/everyone else to deal with it. At best it is grossly irresponsible.
Color me shocked.
A court doing whatever it feels like doing.
If the Supreme Court doesn’t issue a stay then this is absolutely ridiculous
Scratch that, it’s ridiculous in the first place but it becomes more ridiculous.
How does the supreme court get a say?
do elections count or not?
Uh this last minute judicial rewrite completely undermines the ability of the voters to elect the primary candidates of their choosing in a federal election. Sounds like we might have some federal constitutional issues there.
There is no constitutional issue at all. There’s no right to choose the parties’ candidates. There’s no right to have a primary. And this is entirely a matter of state law, there is no federal nexus.
This is not a “last-minute judicial rewrite”. As the court said, HB 1 is not and has never been state law. The secretary had no business using it for the primaries. But this is the earliest date on which the court could possibly have found that, because the secretary deliberately kept it out of the court’s jurisdiction until August 4.
That’s irrelevant, even assuming if we assume, arguendo, that your understanding of the law is correct in all respects. Here we have candidates that were chosen to represent specifically drawn districts that a judge has now eliminated. Quite a different issue than a “right” to have a primary in the first place.
So what? What constitutional right has been abrogated, such that the supreme court has jurisdiction?
“So what”? Outside of corrupt decisions by the democrat party to remove their presidential candidates, “so what” doesn’t hold that much weight. Instead of “so what,” I suspect that the state will reassert many of its election clause arguments as well as due process violations of voter rights.
Vote fraud will happen one way or another
And the judicial branch wonder why people no longer trust or respect them.
I doubt SCOTUS will overturn this. MO may have to make an adjustment for who is nominated by the political parties, but if the new district lines were never legally enacted, they can’t be used.
People, read the footnote that is reproduced in this post. It has all the information you need.
Is it correct to read the footnote as the Court blaming the Republican SoS for following the law? Imagine a court that rules based on their idea of cudashudawuda. As in, “if We were the SoS, this is the way We would have done it”. They make no reference to anything that was legally improper and that was their only job.
It blames him for creating the mess in the first place and then going to the court and demanding that it change the law for him just because of the mess that he deliberately created. Yes, it is a mess, but it’s not the court’s doing, and he has to live with the consequences of his own decisions.
The question for the plaintiffs and the CT would be why no injunction or order to halt use of the disputed map for the primary (which is part of the election) when the validity was unproven/in question? That seems much more appropriate and far less chaotic. IMO the CT here is buck passing as much or more than the Sec State.
The court says why. Because until the secretary finished verifying the signatures on August 4 the court had no jurisdiction. It had to wait for his certification, which he could have given months earlier but deliberately chose to delay until the last minute.
Sure that’s what the CT is CLAIMING. I don’t dispute that in fact I called it out as finger pointing. My point is that the plaintiffs could have asked for an order preventing the use of the contested map until the Sec State finalized his own actions. The legal basis/reasoning the CT used to put a halt to using the new map in this order would have been exactly the same PRIOR to using the maps in the primary portion of the same election cycle.
IMO the CT here is asking to have and eat its cake simultaneously with their footnote admonishment seeking to invoke ‘I told you so’ way back when while also claiming they couldn’t issue an injuction based (as far as I can tell) on ripeness. That’s crap. By the CT’s own admission in the footnote there’s all sorts of ‘harm’ to multiple interests that wasn’t at all speculative but fully known to the CT in the Spring.
No, they couldn’t. There was no case or controversy until August 4. By the Secretary’s deliberate doing.
Question that is being overlooked- the MOSC upheld the districting when it went before it earlier this year. This referendum, where the bulk of the signatures are from KC and STL, was a last minute attempt to get the map thrown out- taking a second bite of the Apple onto speak
Why is the earlier acceptance of the new districts by this court now null and void?
Because the legislative process was not complete. The legislature passed it and the governor signed it, but people are allowed to gather signatures to put it to a referendum within a certain time limit. If sufficient signatures are gathered, the law can’t take effect unless passed in a referendum. They did so, but the SoS slow-walked the signature verification and held the primaries in invalid districts.
When ever one of these little kerfuffles comes up and is caused by a decision by a elected constitutional officer, in this case the Sec. of State for Mo. I really wonder if the politician is a moron or a saboteur.
What the SoS has effectively done in this case is sabotage the redistricting effort. There was little doubt on how the Mo. SC would rule in this case, the SoS knew it and yet he him and hawed and delayed. That really says saboteur to me.