Gov. Mike Kehoe went on the offensive Wednesday against critics of the new congressional map approved by Missouri lawmakers, issuing a statement seeking to rebut charges that one Kansas City precinct was accidentally placed in two different districts.
The ACLU of Missouri, in a case filed last week in Jackson County, argues that the bill approved in a special session improperly designates a voting district of Kansas City to both the 4th Congressional District and the 5th District. While the lawsuit claims that alone should result in the map being thrown out, the ACLU also challenges the map on grounds it splits communities and violates the Missouri Constitution by changing the districts between federal censuses, which occur every 10 years.
The new congressional map is awaiting action by Kehoe, who called lawmakers into special session at the insistence of President Donald Trump. The goal is to give Republicans seven of the state’s eight congressional districts by redrawing the 5th District, currently held by U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat.
In the statement, Kehoe said he intends to sign the bill. The lawsuit’s allegations are wrong, he insists, because there are two distinct geographic areas with the same designation — VTD 811 — in the Census Bureau files used for determining the population of any particular location. That doesn’t mean, he said, the same voters are in two different districts.
“The entire source of confusion is due to the existence of two entirely different VTDs using the same number,” he said.
The ACLU lawsuit is one of three pending cases that are challenging the state’s authority to revise congressional district lines between census reports. One, heard this week in Jefferson City, challenges Kehoe’s authority to call a special session for that purpose.
The other, also in Cole County, argues that no authority exists at all for the new map.
The lawsuit filed in Jackson County is in a very early stage and the only hearing date set so far is a routine court appearance on Dec. 29. As he ponders the duplicate designation, Jackson County Circuit Judge Jalilah Otto must determine whether the bill passed by lawmakers provides enough information to know which of the two voting districts with the same name is in which district.
The ACLU contends that because the bill only lists the district, and not the smaller census blocks within the voting district, for the portions in the 4th District and the 5th District, it is flawed and therefore should be thrown out.
If the two areas with the same designation were properly assigned to different districts, the bill should have identified the census blocks that are part of each, the ACLU lawsuit states.
“We believe the double precinct is just one of several legal flaws which is why we are asking the court to prohibit this map or others from going into effect and to declare the 2022 map as Missouri’s lawful congressional map,” ACLU of Missouri spokesman Tom Bastian said in a statement provided by email.
Former Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice Mike Wolff said the courts must read the language of a bill and cannot add anything that is not included. Fixing any potential errors in the new map, Wolff said, would likely require action by the legislature.
“Drafting errors are supposed to be corrected by new drafts,” Wolff said. “I don’t think you can interpret your way out of this.”
The information the bill does not contain is the geographic coding that the Census Bureau attaches to each of the voter tally districts — commonly known as precincts. Those files designate two precincts in Kansas City as KC811, corresponding with the 11th precinct of Kansas City’s 8th ward. One is assigned to the 4th District in the new map, while the other is assigned to the 5th.
That coding determines which of the two precincts — one containing 32 people, the other 843 — goes into which district, Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the GOP’s chief redistricting organization, said in an interview with The Independent.
Kincaid said the descriptions are the same ones used in 2022 to redraw Missouri’s eight congressional districts.
The bill describing the congressional districts currently in place, passed in 2022, has only one reference to KC 811. That is actually a flaw in that bill, Kincaid contends, and left some voters technically unassigned to a district.
In that case, “the current congressional or the previous congressional map would have been the one that was unconstitutional,” Kincaid said.
A properly written bill should use both designations, Kincadi said.
“If the two Kansas City 811s had both been assigned to district five, they would actually appear twice in district five,” Kincaid said. “If they had been assigned twice to district four, they would appear twice in district four. If one of them had been assigned and the other one not assigned, they would only appear once and the other one would have been left out because it was unassigned.”
Earlier this month, Kincaid produced a memo for the map’s legislative sponsor, Republican state Rep. Dirk Deaton of Noel, explaining the details of the new districts. But he insists that is not evidence that he had a hand in creating the map, pushing back on Democratic claims that the districts were drawn in Washington, D.C., as opposed to the governor’s office.
“I’ll defer to the governor’s office, and what the governor said about the map on that,” Kincaid said. “The governor’s team clearly produced and developed this map.”
He said the point of the memo, which was obtained by The Independent, was to provide arguments about why the bill meets constitutional requirements for compact districts with connected geographic areas.
“I looked at the way the districts were drawn, and how they were drawn, and I gave a report to the representative about it,” Kincaid said. “I had been asked to do the report. So I did it.”
A spokeswoman for Kehoe said the map was drawn by members of the governor’s staff “with extensive knowledge and experience in the redistricting and map drawing process.”
Democrats who oppose the new map said the duplicated description is an error that should sink the bill.
“I hope it is horribly fatal,” said state Sen. Barbara Washington, a Democrat from Kansas City.
Senate Minority Leader Doug Beck, an Affton Democrat, said the duplication is hard for Republicans to explain.
“The president told Missouri Republicans to pass his map ‘as is,’ and they did – with all its flaws,” Beck said. “Now, the governor has to choose between telling the president his ‘as is’ map might be wrong or signing a flawed map into law and hoping a judge doesn’t care. Any Republican who was told to blindly follow their leaders and not ask questions should be feeling pretty ticked off right about now.”
Under pressure from Trump, Republicans took just 10 days for the special session. The two bills passed — changes to the majority requirements for passing constitutional amendments by initiative along with redistricting — were sped through the House, then approved in the Senate with no changes from the point they were introduced.
The Senate allowed only four hours of debate on redistricting and none on the initiative changes.
In 2022, redistricting dominated the entire session. The first bills were introduced in December, before the legislature convened, and the final version wasn’t passed until the last day of work in May.
“It is no surprise that the slapdash process in which the legislature engaged — ramming through the bill, failing to publicly release an electronic GIS file that legislators, staff, and the public could view and vet, and instead only releasing the district assignments in PDF to obscure the map from any transparency — resulted in the most basic of errors,” the ACLU lawsuit states.
Chuck Hatfield, a Jefferson City attorney representing opponents in one of the lawsuits in Cole County, said he was not aware of the duplicate designations when he filed his challenge.
“Our position is you’re not allowed to draw maps at all,” Hatfield said. “You can’t do that in between censuses. So our position is, we don’t care what this map looks like, you can’t be doing them.”
Hatfield said he thought the duplicated designation is a “fatal flaw” in the map.
Regardless of where the map was drawn or any potential flaws, Democratic state Sen. Stephen Webber of Columbia said the special session showed Republicans are determined to have complete power in the state and will not tolerate dissent.
Senate Republicans shut off debate on both bills passed during the special session, wouldn’t allow any debate on one, refused to consider amendments and removed state Sen. Lincoln Hough of Springfield as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee after he opposed the bills.
“This is about consolidating power,” Webber said, “and having as few people as possible run the state of Missouri.”
Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.