Missouri’s Republican secretary of state is refusing to count nearly a third of the pages of petition signatures his office received from a group seeking a statewide vote on a newly gerrymandered congressional map.
The map, which was redrawn at President Donald Trump’s urging, is designed to shore up Republicans’ chances of keeping control of the U.S. House in this year’s midterms and achieves this largely by diluting the voting power of Black communities. Missouri Republicans have pulled out all the stops in their effort to prevent voters from having a chance to weigh in, including an investigation launched by the state’s attorney general over unsubstantiated allegations about a group involved in obtaining signatures for the petition.
We now have a new ripple to the story, after Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’ recent rejection. As the Missouri Independent reported:
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 information was revealed as part of a related case making its way through the state court system. The Missouri Independent noted that the judge overseeing this case has said he won’t issue a ruling on the signatures “until the verification process shows whether the referendum petition can succeed without signatures collected before Oct. 14.”
Hoskins previously told The Associated Press that he was “going to do everything I can to protect” the gerrymandered map. And it’s fair to assume his rejection of thousands of signatures is connected to that vow.
