Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

GOP arranges a do-over for Missouri voters on revamping redistricting

Missouri voters

In 2018, a majority of Missouri voters supported a ballot measure for redistricting reform, but the latest action from the Republican-controlled Legislature threatens to undo that result.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

Voters in Missouri will decide this fall whether to abandon a decision they made just two years ago, which was to minimize power politics and maximize fairness and competition in the drawing of legislative boundaries.

A measure added to the November ballot on Wednesday by the Republican-majority General Assembly would essentially reverse those priorities, and also do away with plans to put dominant power over redistricting in the hands of a nonpartisan statistician.

The referendum now looms as an ominous, and rare, potential counterweight to a string of good-government reforms adopted across the country by the will of the people in recent years. Its adoption would be the most prominent repudiation in years of a citizen-driven effort to fix democracy's challenges.


Democracy reform groups lambasted the Legislature's move and vowed to mount a campaign to persuade the electorate to reject the measure — which many may not see coming, or be confused by its meaning, while preoccupied with the coronavirus pandemic.

"We need to make sure everyone in America knows that these politicians exploited a national crisis to make a political power grab," said James Jameson, who runs national voter mobilization for RepresentUs.

"In a shameful and undemocratic power-grab, politicians are trying to overturn the will of the voters to serve their own interests," said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the progressive Ballot Initiative Strategy Center.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

The outcome of the referendum will set the rules for mapmaking in the state for the coming decade, once the detailed population counts from the ongoing but delayed census are finished next year.

The system now in place, approved with 62 percent support in 2018, created the new and nonpartisan post of state demographer in charge of drawing the 197 state House and Senate districts. It also sets "partisan fairness" and "competitiveness" as the top criteria in the line drawing. The demographer's maps are the final word unless a supermajority of a citizen's commission rejects them.

The referendum would eliminate the demographer's job and instruct equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats on the commission to come up with compromise maps where those characteristics are bumped down to the lowest priority — behind such other characteristics as compactness and the promotion of minority voting rights. If the panel could not reach a deal, the line-drawing would be assigned to a special team of judges.

Under the new proposal, maps could be drawn with such a significant partisan gerrymander that a party winning 50 percent of the vote statewide could nonetheless end up with 65 percent of the seats in Jefferson City, according to the nonpartisan organization of demographers PlanScore.org. They said no state legislative maps anywhere in the country in the last four decades have had a difference of as much as 15 percentage points — what's known in redistricting as an "efficiency gap."

Critics also said the wording of the ballot measure would allow the state to stop accounting for the entire population in the drawing of districts — as required by the "one person, one vote" Supreme Court standard for setting of congressional boundaries — and could instead exclude non-citizens and children in mapmaking, a departure from language in the Missouri Constitution since 1875.

Critics of this switch said it would disproportionately affect the state's big cities, which are dominated by Democrats.

"It would weaken protections for communities of color, undermine independence, deprioritize partisan fairness, and deprive voters of their fair day in court," said Yurij Rudensky, the progressive Brennan Center for Justice's redistricting expert.

A lawsuit to stop the referendum over the "one person, one vote" arguments was vowed by Clean Missouri, which led the successful campaign for the redistricting measure two years ago.

The measure, which the Senate approved in February, was endorsed in the House on a mostly — but not entirely — party-line vote of 98-58. Some Democrats supported the proposal, for two reasons: They expect the altered system would preserve their political futures, and the referendum also proposes such popular-sounding reforms as a ban on lobbyist gifts to lawmakers and a slight reduction in campaign contribution limits.

Even some Republicans in the General Assembly had doubts about the measure before it passed. State Rep. Rocky Miller, who chairs the Legislative Oversight Committee, said during a hearing on Monday that the measure would be another strike against the GOP.

"This is going to go down in flames if it makes it to the ballot. This will not pass at all," he said.

Read More

"Voter Here" sign outside of a polling location.

"Voter Here" sign outside of a polling location.

Getty Images, Grace Cary

Stopping the Descent Toward Banana Republic Elections

President Trump’s election-related executive order begins by pointing out practices in Canada, Sweden, Brazil, and elsewhere that outperform the U.S. But it is Trump’s order itself that really demonstrates how far we’ve fallen behind. In none of the countries mentioned, or any other major democracy in the world, would the head of government change election rules by decree, as Trump has tried to do.

Trump is the leader of a political party that will fight for control of Congress in 2026, an election sure to be close, and important to his presidency. The leader of one side in such a competition has no business unilaterally changing its rules—that’s why executive decrees changing elections only happen in tinpot dictatorships, not democracies.

Keep ReadingShow less
"Vote" pin.
Getty Images, William Whitehurst

Most Americans’ Votes Don’t Matter in Deciding Elections

New research from the Unite America Institute confirms a stark reality: Most ballots cast in American elections don’t matter in deciding the outcome. In 2024, just 14% of eligible voters cast a meaningful vote that actually influenced the outcome of a U.S. House race. For state house races, on average across all 50 states, just 13% cast meaningful votes.

“Too many Americans have no real say in their democracy,” said Unite America Executive Director Nick Troiano. “Every voter deserves a ballot that not only counts, but that truly matters. We should demand better than ‘elections in name only.’”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hand Placing Ballot in Box With American Flag
Getty Images, monkeybusinessimages

We Can Fix This: Our Politics Really Can Work – These Stories Show How

As American politics polarizes ever further, voters across the political spectrum agree that our current system is not delivering for the American people. Eighty-five percent of Americans feel most elected officials don’t care what people like them think. Eighty-eight percent of them say our political system is broken.

Whether it’s the quality and safety of their kids’ schools, housing affordability and rising homelessness, scarce and pricey healthcare, or any number of other issues that touch Americans’ everyday lives, the lived experience of polarization comes from such problems—and elected officials’ failure to address them.

Keep ReadingShow less
Why America’s Elections Will Never Be the Same After Trump
text
Photo by Dan Dennis on Unsplash

Why America’s Elections Will Never Be the Same After Trump

Donald Trump wasted no time when he returned to the White House. Within hours, he signed over 200 executive orders, rapidly dismantling years of policy and consolidating control with the stroke of a pen. But the frenzy of reversals was only the surface. Beneath it lies a deeper, more troubling transformation: presidential elections have become all-or-nothing battles, where the victor rewrites the rules of government and the loser’s agenda is annihilated.

And it’s not just the orders. Trump’s second term has unleashed sweeping deportations, the purging of federal agencies, and a direct assault on the professional civil service. With the revival of Schedule F, regulatory rollbacks, and the targeting of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, the federal bureaucracy is being rigged to serve partisan ideology. Backing him is a GOP-led Congress, too cowardly—or too complicit—to assert its constitutional authority.

Keep ReadingShow less