--- title: "Missouri Tried Its New House Map Three Times; the Supreme Court Kept Saying No" description: "With ballots already mailed and absentee voting under way, the justices rule Missouri’s 2026 election will use its 2022 districts" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-09-25T22:06:16Z modified: 2026-09-26T17:04:18Z url: https://rews.cc/a/missouri-tried-its-new-house-map-three-times-the-supreme-cou-781f6a language: en tags: ["supreme-court", "politics", "trump", "redistricting", "elections", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Missouri Tried Its New House Map Three Times; the Supreme Court Kept Saying No *With ballots already mailed and absentee voting under way, the justices rule Missouri’s 2026 election will use its 2022 districts* By Nate Ledger · September 25, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/missouri-tried-its-new-house-map-three-times-the-supreme-cou-781f6a ## In brief - The Supreme Court, with no dissents, blocked Missouri’s 2025 congressional map for the third time - November’s election will use the 2022 map: six Republican-held seats and two Democratic seats - The GOP map, drawn at Trump’s urging, cracked Rep. Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City-based district to create a 7-1 split - A citizen referendum put the map on the November ballot; the state supreme court held the secretary of state in contempt - Citing the Purcell principle, the court said switching maps now would ‘usher in electoral chaos’ There is a principle in American election law — judges call it the *Purcell* principle, after a 2006 Supreme Court case — holding that federal courts should not “alter the election rules” of a state “on the eve of an election,” because last-minute changes confuse voters and the people running the polls. It is a sensible principle. On Friday the Supreme Court applied it, for the third time in as many weeks, to tell Missouri Republicans that the congressional map they have been trying to use in November’s midterms will not be used in November’s midterms. There were no dissents. “Ballots using the 2022 map have been printed and mailed. Absentee voting has already begun, as has military and overseas voting,” the court wrote in its unsigned order. “At this late date, ordering reversion to the 2025 map in the midst of an ongoing election would usher in electoral chaos.” And: “The election is not merely upcoming; it has already started.” So Missouri will elect its House members under the lines drawn in 2022 — six Republican-held seats, two Democratic — the same districts voters used in 2022 and 2024. Some backstory. States normally redistrict once a decade, after the census. Last year, at President Donald Trump’s urging, Missouri’s Republican lawmakers redrew their map mid-decade, part of a national push that, according to NPR, ended up tilting roughly nine or ten districts toward the GOP; Democrats in states like California answered with new maps of their own. Missouri’s 2025 lines took aim at the 5th District held by Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, breaking up its Kansas City base and stretching it into rural, Republican-leaning parts of the state — a 7-1 map instead of 6-2. But Missouri has a referendum process, and opponents — a group called People Not Politicians — gathered enough citizen signatures to put the map to a vote this November. Under state law, a law that is subject to a referendum is suspended until the vote happens. Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins waited until the eve of the primary to decide the referendum push was illegitimate, rejected it, and ordered the new map used in the Aug. 4 primary anyway. More than a million Missourians cast primary votes under it. The Missouri Supreme Court then ruled there were no grounds to reject the referendum, that the 2025 map had never lawfully taken effect, and that the 2022 map should govern November — noting it had said back in May, before the primary, that the new map would require voter approval before it could be used. It blamed Hoskins for proceeding regardless, and ultimately held him in contempt. The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Sept. 10 to disturb that ruling — Justice Brett Kavanaugh turned away a request to pause it — while letting the broader case continue. The fight might have ended there. Instead, on Sept. 4, a new federal lawsuit arrived, filed by Rick Brattin — who happens to be the Republican nominee for Cleaver’s seat — along with Rep. Bob Onder, R-Mo., and two voters. Missouri-based U.S. District Judge Stephen Clark ruled the 2025 map should be used, and on Monday the St. Louis-based 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, reasoning that “the Constitution does not permit Missouri to use a different congressional district map in the November 2026 general election than it used in the August 2026 primary election.” Which is one way to see it. Notice that both sides of this case are making the same argument from opposite directions. The appeals court said consistency demands keeping the map from the primary. Gov. Mike Kehoe, a Republican, said Friday that “voters deserved consistency and certainty, and not for the rules to be changed between elections.” But of course the rules had already been changed between elections — mid-decade, at the president’s request, by his own party. And the only reason the primary ran on the new map is that the secretary of state ran it that way after the state’s highest court had signaled, in May, that the map was not yet law. The “we must keep using this map because we already used this map” position rather depends on nobody asking how it came to be used. County election officials, caught in the middle, warned the federal courts more than a week ago that it was already too late to switch and pleaded against inflicting “additional vertigo on local election authorities.” On Friday the justices granted the emergency application from People Not Politicians and shut it all down. “The District Court and Court of Appeals should not order or otherwise require Missouri to use the 2025 map in the 2026 congressional election in Missouri,” the court wrote — about as close to “stop asking” as an unsigned order gets. “We are done with corrupt politicians trying to force their map into effect outside the process outlined in the Missouri constitution,” said Richard von Glahn, the group’s executive director. Cleaver told NBC News he was “very happy”: “It lasted much too long, but it’s over now. The manufactured chaos, you know, has at long last ended.” It was actually the second midterm-related decision the court issued that day. In the other, over the dissent of the three liberal justices, it [handed the Trump administration a win](https://rews.cc/a/america-s-supreme-court-revives-a-federal-tool-for-hunting-n-a5f6e4) on the use of a federal database to vet voters’ citizenship status. Missouri, for its part, will comply: “Nevertheless, Missouri will follow the Court’s order,” Kehoe wrote. The coda is that the whole saga may turn out to have been about timing rather than outcome. The referendum is still on the November ballot, so Missouri voters will get to decide the 2025 map’s fate for future cycles — just not for the election that has already begun. Three trips to the Supreme Court, one contempt citation and one very confusing primary later, the state is back where the challengers said its constitution required it to be all along: voting under the old map now, and asking the people about the new one. It took a while to arrive at the obvious. ## Sources - [Supreme Court blocks Trump-backed Missouri congressional map](https://npr.org/2026/09/25/nx-s1-5978875/midterms-redistricting-trump-missouri) — npr.org - [Supreme Court rejects Republicans’ Missouri redistricting push for third time](https://nbcnews.com/politics/elections/supreme-court-third-time-rejects-republican-redistricting-push-missour-rcna599218) — nbcnews.com - [Supreme Court rejects GOP's third bid to win Democratic House seat in Missouri](https://cnn.com/2026/09/25/politics/supreme-court-rejects-gop-third-effort-to-capture-house-seat-from-missouri) — cnn.com