Explainer: GOP’s Multi-Front Effort to Shield Missouri Gerrymander From Voters

Missouri is at the center of one of the most brazen assaults on democracy of the Trump era.

In September, Republicans rammed through a mid-cycle congressional gerrymander meant to secure a 7–1 advantage in the state’s U.S. House delegation. The move is part of a national GOP effort, driven by President Donald Trump, to redraw maps mid-decade to ensure a partisan advantage ahead of the 2026 midterms. 

But Missouri voters quickly responded, working to organize a referendum on whether to approve the gerrymander, as the state’s constitution allows.

Organizers must gather around 106,000 valid signatures from six of the eight congressional districts by Dec. 11, and they say they’ve already collected far more than that.

But as the referendum gained traction, GOP officials have pulled out a remarkable range of dirty tricks to try to stop it.

They have: 

• filed a lawsuit to strip voters of the right to veto a congressional map; 
• tried to throw out tens of thousands of signatures; 
• written blatantly biased ballot language to describe the measure to voters; 
• used misleading text messages to try to pressure voters into removing their names from the petitions; 
• and even contacted Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a bid to intimidate signature gatherers.

What should have been a straightforward exercise of direct democracy — letting Missourians decide whether their new districts are fair — has instead turned into a test of whether voters can still check partisan power at all. 

And it’s led to a tangle of litigation from both sides. With court hearings unfolding in the coming days, the fate of the referendum and the future of Missouri’s representation in Congress hang in the balance.

Here’s where the cases stand.

The GOP’s Fight to Invalidate Voters’ Signatures

For weeks, Secretary of State Denny Hoskins (R) refused to process the referendum paperwork at all, insisting he could not act until the gerrymander (HB 1) officially became law. 

Once the bill was signed, Hoskins then declared that every signature gathered before Oct. 15 — the day he personally approved the petition — was invalid. Hoskins even suggested that volunteers collecting those “premature” signatures may have committed misdemeanor election offenses, a claim voting rights advocates called absurd and chilling.

People Not Politicians (PNP), the grassroots coalition that initiated the referendum effort, quickly challenged Hoskins’ claim arguing that Missouri’s constitution does not require voters to wait for a bureaucratic green light to begin collecting signatures.

“We’re not backing down. We will defend First Amendment rights. We will qualify this referendum,”  PNP director Richard von Glahn told Democracy Docket. “Ultimately, Missourians — Republicans, Democrats, and Independents — will decide whether they want this gerrymander, not the politicians trying to force it through.” 

The group points to a 2022 Missouri Supreme Court ruling that struck down similar timing restrictions for referendum campaigns, finding that lawmakers cannot use procedural barriers to burden a right the constitution guarantees. 

Nothing in the state constitution, they argue, says people must wait for the governor to sign a bill or for the secretary of state to approve formatting before they can start gathering names.

The legal fight escalated when a new political action committee, Put Missouri First, jumped into the case. The PAC was created Oct. 31 and funded with $100,000 from the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Republican National Committee. Its lawyers pushed to delay the case and have it reassigned to a new judge, now Judge Christopher Limbaugh, successfully slowing down proceedings just as the signature deadline approached.

The case was originally set for trial Nov. 3, then postponed when the first judge fell ill. It was pushed back again after the PAC intervened, and is now scheduled for Dec. 8 — just three days before the signature deadline.

If the group loses, over 90,000 signatures would be invalidated and the group must meet the December deadline without them, all while Republican operatives continue working to scare voters into rescinding their signatures.

The GOP’s Fight to Deny Voters’ Right to Reject a Gerrymander

While the fight over signatures plays out in state court, Republicans are waging an even more audacious effort in federal court — one that aims to wipe out the referendum entirely.

In October, Hoskins and Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway (R), on behalf of the General Assembly, filed a sweeping lawsuit arguing that Missouri voters simply do not have the right to veto a congressional map at all. Their claim hinges almost entirely on a fringe legal theory that has gained traction on the far right in recent years — the so-called “independent state legislature” theory.

Under this extreme theory, Republicans posit that because the U.S. Constitution says the “Legislature” sets the rules for congressional elections, the Legislature alone controls redistricting and neither courts nor voters have a say in the process. 

In other words, Missouri Republicans are arguing that citizens cannot use their state constitutionally guaranteed referendum power when it comes to congressional districts and therefore the referendum on HB 1 is illegal.

This case is one of the clearest GOP attempts yet to revive a doctrine the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected.

If Republicans succeed, Missouri voters would lose the ability to overturn any future map, no matter how discriminatory.

Von Glahn and PNP have moved to dismiss the case, arguing that nothing in the Elections Clause strips Missouri voters of a power their constitution has protected for more than 100 years. In fact, Missouri voters have used their referendum right to overturn congressional maps in the past. And in 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court held that citizens’ initiatives can play a role in redistricting because the word “legislature” refers to a state’s full lawmaking process — not just the politicians inside the statehouse.

Perhaps the most startling element of the federal lawsuit is how personally it targets von Glahn. In the complaint, Hanaway included his home address in the filing multiple times, a move that voting rights advocates say serves no legal purpose and reads as an unmistakable attempt to intimidate. 

“Missouri politicians continue to try to confuse, intimidate and, frankly, silence us. We will not be intimidated or distracted,” von Glahn said. “This lawsuit is a desperate attempt by politicians to distract and confuse Missouri voters from exercising their constitutional rights.”

On Nov. 25, the court heard both the Republicans’ request for an injunction on the referendum and PNP’s motion to dismiss the case. No ruling has been issued yet.

Minority Sen. Leader Doug Beck (D) filed a misconduct complaint against Hanaway for improperly naming the entire General Assembly as a plaintiff in the suit to block the referendum.

The GOP’s Fight to Mislead Voters in Favor of Their Gerrymander

Even as Republicans try to stop the referendum from reaching the ballot, they’re also working to shape what voters will see if it gets there. 

Last week, PNP filed yet another lawsuit — this one targeting the language that Hoskins wrote to describe the referendum to voters.

In Missouri, the ‘ballot summary’ is often the only thing voters see when casting their ballots and state law requires that language to be accurate and impartial. PNP asserts Hoskins’ summary is anything but.

His summary for the referendum labels the old 2022 map as “gerrymandered” and one “that protects incumbent politicians.” He claims the new 2025 map “keeps more cities and counties intact,” says it is “more compact” and “better reflects statewide voting patterns.”

Von Glahn and PNP argue the summary is “inaccurate, insufficient, biased and unfair” — and they say Hoskins had no authority to write it in the first place. 

Missouri law allows the secretary of state to write summaries for citizen-led ballot initiatives, not veto referendums. A referendum, they argue, is fundamentally different as it’s a direct challenge to a law the Legislature just passed, and nothing in Missouri statutes gives Hoskins the power to dress it up with a partisan spin.

The lawsuit asks the court to order a neutral rewrite or to strip the summary entirely and simply ask voters whether they want to keep or repeal HB 1.

PNP has moved to expedite the trial into early 2026 — a timeline designed to resolve the issue before ballots are printed. A status conference is scheduled for Dec. 22. 

Hoskins’ office has offered little public defense of his ballot language. 

This battle is especially crucial because even if voters maintain the right to a referendum — even if they overcome signature restrictions and defeat the federal attempt to kill the referendum outright — biased ballot language could still tilt the outcome towards keeping a gerrymandered map sold to them as an anti-gerrymander measure.

The GOP’s Fight to Sabotage the Signature Gathering Effort

As the lawsuits piled up, Republicans have opened another front — one aimed at suffocating the signature-gathering process entirely. 

In November, Advanced Micro Targeting (AMT), the firm hired by PNP to facilitate statewide signature collection, filed a lawsuit detailing what it called an organized campaign to sabotage the referendum drive. The federal suit accuses several firms aligned with referendum opponents — including the Florida-based company Let the Voters Decide — of targeting AMT’s workers with a coordinated poaching and disruption scheme. 

According to the complaint, GOP-aligned operatives allegedly used a confidential list to identify AMT’s top employees, then offered “huge sums of money” — as much as $30,000 per person — to convince them to quit mid-campaign. And the offers came with strings attached. Workers were allegedly asked to turn over petition sheets, reveal internal data and provide “intelligence” on PNP’s strategy. 

AMT also claims the firms spread defamatory statements about the company’s legality and business practices to sow distrust among voters and volunteers.

Around the same time, Hanaway publicly declared, without evidence, that AMT employed undocumented workers and announced she had referred the firm to ICE. Neither ICE nor the attorney general’s office contacted AMT before the announcement.

“She did not even contact AMT before tweeting, so yes, completely baseless without even an attempt to ascertain the truth,” von Glahn told Democracy Docket. “Just the latest example of desperate politicians seeking to silence the voices of Missourians. It is outrageous and dangerous.”

AMT and PNP called the move “political thuggery.”

Taken together — the firm’s allegations and Hanaway’s unhinged tactics — paint an unsettling picture of just how far and low GOP-aligned actors are willing to go to deny voters a voice and subvert democratic norms for a partisan map.