Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins certified prejudicial ballot summary for congressional redistricting referendum

On November 13, 2025, Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins certified a ballot summary for a referendum on the state's 2025 Trump-backed congressional redistricting map. The summary asked voters whether to approve a measure that would "repeal Missouri's existing gerrymandered congressional plan that protects incumbent politicians" and replace it with new boundaries that "keep more cities and counties intact, are more compact, and better reflects statewide voting patterns" -- characterizing the new map favorably while offering no comparable description of the old map's history or the new map's own partisan effects.

Missouri lawmakers passed the new congressional map during a September 2025 special session called at President Trump's request, redrawing districts in an attempt to give Republicans seven of the state's eight U.S. House seats by targeting the Kansas City-area 5th District held by Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. Under Missouri law, Hoskins's office is responsible for writing the ballot summary that appears before voters on any referendum measure, and the political action committee People Not Politicians -- which was already collecting signatures to force a statewide vote on the map -- was among the summary's first readers when Hoskins made it public.

Updates

2025-11-20 — People Not Politicians sued over the ballot summary [1, 3, 4]

People Not Politicians filed suit against Hoskins in Cole County on November 20, 2025, one week after the certification, alleging the ballot summary was written to bias voters toward keeping the new congressional map rather than neutrally describing the referendum choice.

2026-01-09 — Hoskins's attorney conceded the language was near-prejudicial [1]

At a hearing before Cole County Circuit Judge Brian Stumpe, Hoskins's attorney, Kathleen Hunker of the Missouri Attorney General's office, conceded that the ballot language "does come close enough to the line of being inherently argumentative and likely to create prejudice," and said the state would withdraw its opposition to revising it.

2026-03-20 — Judge Stumpe struck the biased language from the summary [3, 4, 5, 7]

Cole County Circuit Judge Brian Stumpe ordered Hoskins to remove the phrases describing the prior map as "gerrymandered" and as protecting "incumbent politicians," along with the claim that the new map better reflects statewide voting patterns, ruling the original wording unfair and likely to create prejudice.

2026-04-30 — Appeals court further narrowed the ballot summary [6]

The Western District Court of Appeals found Hoskins's claims that the new map is "more compact" and keeps "more cities" intact were unsupported by the legislation or official maps, retaining only the verifiable claim about counties kept intact and reversing part of Judge Stumpe's order in the process.