Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to get the latest.For two days this week, Missouri election officials faced an extraordinary problem: The state supreme court had ordered them to prepare November’s congressional election using one map, while a federal judge ordered them to use another.The U.S. Supreme Court ended that uncertainty Thursday with unusual speed, acting less than a day after being asked to intervene and just over a week before ballots must begin going to military and overseas voters. The ruling cleared the way for Missouri election officials to use the 2022 congressional map, under which Republicans hold six of the state’s eight U.S. House seats, instead of the Republican-drawn 2025 map designed to make seven districts strongly Republican.Ruth Greenwood, director of the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, said she saw Thursday’s ruling as one hopeful sign that the justices understand the importance of making speedy decisions on election issues as November approaches. “I hope the Supreme Court appreciates that they really do need to have paramount in their mind what is going to be the most straightforward thing for election administrators and voters,” she said. Interviews with Missouri election officials suggest that the mechanical work of switching between those maps was not necessarily the hardest part. The state had prepared both configurations months ago. The more serious problem was not knowing which map officials would ultimately be required to use — uncertainty that could have forced counties to redo ballot programming and testing, resend ballots to military and overseas voters, or account for ballots already issued in the wrong congressional districts.The Kafkaesque week was the culmination of a yearlong dispute over the Show-Me State’s congressional lines. Last September, heeding President Donald Trump’s call for Republican-controlled states to redistrict, Missouri’s legislature and governor enacted a new U.S. House map designed to flip the Kansas City-based 5th Congressional District from blue to red. But opponents quickly mobilized a veto referendum campaign against the map, and in December they submitted enough signatures to qualify it for the November ballot.Under the Missouri Constitution, laws subject to veto referenda are not supposed to take effect until voters weigh in. But Denny Hoskins, Missouri’s Republican secretary of state, repeatedly tried to get around that. First, he waited until the last possible day — indeed, the last possible hour — to determine whether the referendum had enough signatures to qualify. Then, when that deadline came, he said he wasn’t putting the referendum on the ballot anyway because he claimed it violated the Missouri Constitution.Referendum supporters immediately sued in state court, and on Sept. 3, the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Hoskins was wrong: The referendum was valid, and the gerrymandered congressional map was not. Republicans made a last-ditch appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh rejected their case Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. Central time. Half an hour later, though, Judge Stephen Clark of the Eastern District of Missouri ruled the opposite: Missouri should use the 2025 gerrymandered map in November because it had used it in the primary. That ruling came in a separate federal lawsuit that Republican congressional candidates (who argued they were injured by having to run under the old map) had filed the day after the Missouri Supreme Court’s decision.Confusion reigned. State officials first directed local election authorities to use the 2022 map, then reversed course after Clark’s order and told them to use the newer map instead.How Missouri election officials handled dueling mapsThe legal whiplash came amid starkly different claims about how difficult another map change would be for affected areas.Hoskins and Republican litigants argued in court that reverting to the 2022 lines risked serious disruption. They pointed to ballots that had already been tested and printed, the approaching deadline for military and overseas ballots, and testimony from a former Jackson County election official that changing the maps at that stage would be “impossible.”Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon, an elected Democrat whose county is affected by the shifting boundaries, disputed that characterization. “It does not cause logistical problems for us at all,” she said in an interview with Votebeat before the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling. “[Both maps are] available, we just need to know which one to check the box for. It’s very simple; we just need a decision by the court.”Lennon said election officials had already grappled with the difficult logistical work in May, when the state was wrestling with which map to use. In an affidavit filed in the litigation, she explained that creating the new districts required counties to tie precincts and voters to the new congressional boundaries. But the 2022 districts were never overwritten, meaning both configurations remained available in Missouri’s centralized voter registration system.Republican Allen Seabaugh, the Scott County clerk and president of the Missouri Association of County Clerks and Election Authorities, said election officials across the state spent the last week “watching and trying to plan for whatever could happen, so that whenever a final decision is made we can act fast.”Scott County remains in the same congressional district under either map. But Seabaugh said counties use different vendors and face different operational obstacles, making the uncertainty difficult to assess and manage statewide.“There’s a lot of unknown, but we still have to do it accurately,” he said.The longer the legal uncertainty continued, he said, the greater the risk that it would collide with voting. If officials sent ballots under one congressional map and were later ordered to use another, counties could have to account for and resend ballots issued under the wrong district assignments.The real pressure came from the calendarMissouri election officials had built technical workarounds for this uncertainty, but they could not eliminate the consequences of changing the rules while an election is underway, Seabaugh said.“The unknown can create uncertainty but it can also create errors,” Seabaugh said, adding that, in many Missouri counties, clerks handle responsibilities far beyond elections. “The more chaos and unknown you bring can leave you neglecting other things.”Missouri election officials now know which map will govern the November election. But the broader concern extends well beyond Missouri. As Election Day approaches nationwide, Greenwood said, courts have less room to make changes without disrupting election preparations already underway across the country.“I am just hoping at this point that the Supreme Court would like an election to happen without complete chaos,” said Greenwood. “I would hope they would want the least chaotic version of an election going forward and to that end would make decisions that support that.” Jessica Huseman is Votebeat’s editorial director and is based in Dallas. Contact Jessica at jhuseman@votebeat.org.Dion Nissenbaum is Votebeat’s senior national reporter and is based in Houston. Contact Dion at dnissenbaum@votebeat.org.Nathaniel Rakich is Votebeat’s managing editor and is based in Washington, D.C. Contact Nathaniel at nrakich@votebeat.org.
