Republican throws out 16K signatures demanding vote on red state's gerrymandering

Signatures on only two-thirds of the petition pages submitted to force a statewide vote on Missouri’s gerrymandered congressional map will go through the verification process, new filings in a Cole County court case show.

Secretary of State Denny Hoskins delivered 33,068 pages to local election authorities out of 49,773 pages with signatures collected by a political action committee called People Not Politicians. The PAC began circulating petitions after lawmakers passed the new map on Sept. 12. Those pages will be checked to determine which signatures are from registered voters.

Hoskins held back the rest because he does not believe signatures collected before Oct. 14 — the day he approved the form of the petition — are valid. Any pages with at least one signature dated Oct. 14 or later were sent to local election authorities, an exhibit included in the court filings state.

The filing is part of the case pending before Cole County Circuit Judge Christopher Limbaugh over which signatures must be counted. On Dec. 12, Limbaugh declared he would not issue a ruling until the verification process shows whether the referendum petition can succeed without signatures collected before Oct. 14.

People Not Politicians needs approximately 110,000 signatures spread among six of the state’s eight congressional districts to put the redistricting plan to a statewide vote. The 49,773 pages have 305,968 signatures overall, but the filings do not show how many signatures are on the pages being checked.

In other court filings, People Not Politicians has stated that about 103,000 of the signatures were collected before the cutoff date.

The raw signature counts — including the names on pages not sent for verification — show enough signatures were collected in the city of St. Louis to qualify the 1st District and enough in Greene County to qualify the 7th District.

The data did not show the breakdown in split counties. There were 71,008 signatures submitted from St. Louis County, which is split between the 1st and 2nd districts. There were 59,823 signatures collected in Jackson County, which includes the 4th, 5th and 6th districts, and 30,110 signatures collected in Boone County, which is split between the 3rd and 4th districts.

The two districts where the petition is unlikely to have enough signatures are the 6th Congressional District in north Missouri and the 8th Congressional District in southeast Missouri.

The gerrymandered map was forced through by Republicans who succumbed to pressure from President Donald Trump and revised the eight districts during a September special session.

The intended result from the new map is to flip the 5th District to the GOP. The district, based in Kansas City, has been represented by Democratic U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver since 2005.

The district is carved up under the new map with portions attached to the 4th and 6th Districts. Heavily Republican areas stretching along the Missouri River to Boone County would be added to the remaining Kansas City portions.

If the referendum has sufficient signatures, the map would be on the November ballot unless lawmakers set an earlier date.