Missouri Republicans make final plea to Supreme Court to revive gerrymandered map

Missouri Republicans made their last-ditch pitch to the U.S. Supreme Court to swap congressional maps for the midterms even as voting is already underway in the Show Me State.

Local election officials have sent out some overseas and absentee ballots using congressional district lines drawn in 2022 in accordance with a ruling from the Missouri Supreme Court. 

But a federal appeals court this week ordered Missouri to use a gerrymandered map passed by lawmakers in 2025, which it used for the August primary, despite the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously ruling the map has never gone into legal effect and cannot be used unless voters approve it in a referendum. 

The Republican candidates argue Missouri must use the same maps for both the primary and general elections to ensure voters have a chance to choose their representatives.

“More than 1.4 million Missourians could not vote for the congressional district nominees who will appear on their November 2026 general election ballot, and more than a quarter-million Missourians who voted in the August 2026 primary election cast a vote for a congressional district candidate who now cannot represent them,” they wrote in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Missouri state officials echoed that argument in their own brief to the justices.

“If this Court grants a stay, that would be the fifth time that a court has ordered Missouri to use a different congressional map since September 3—when the Missouri Supreme Court became the first court to ever enter an injunction forcing a State to use a dramatically different congressional map between a primary and general election,” the state officials wrote.

“The honest truth is that the chaos injected by the Missouri Supreme Court will remain no matter what this Court does,” they added.

Florida, Texas and 20 other red states also filed a brief in support of Missouri’s gerrymander. In the filing, they lambasted the Missouri Supreme Court for what they said was an “eleventh-hour overhaul” after it ruled earlier this month that the map was never legal.

A decision from the U.S. Supreme Court could come at any time. It will be the third time in as many weeks the justices rule on the issue after the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals revived the gerrymander on Monday.

People Not Politicians*, the group representing the referendum proponents, said in its appeal to the Supreme Court on Tuesday night that the 8th Circuit constructed its ruling from “whole cloth” in defiance of previous orders from the justices.

The group also warned of the practical “impossibility” of switching maps at this stage in the election.

“Ballots using the 2022 map have been printed and mailed, and absentee voting, both by mail and in-person, began today,” they wrote. “Those ballots cannot be reassigned to new districts now. As one election official put it, an imperative to change maps now that voting has begun is ‘the stuff of nightmares for election administrators.’”

*The Elias Law Group (ELG) represents the pro-voting parties in this case. ELG Firm Chair Marc Elias is the founder of Democracy Docket.