Signatures on only two-thirds of the petition pages submitted to force a statewide vote on Missouri’s gerrymandered congressional map will go through the verification process, new filings in a Cole County court case show.
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 filing is part of the case pending before Cole County Circuit Judge Christopher Limbaugh over which signatures must be counted. On Dec. 12, Limbaugh declared he would not issue a ruling until the verification process shows whether the referendum petition can succeed without signatures collected before Oct. 14.
People Not Politicians needs approximately 110,000 signatures spread among six of the state’s eight congressional districts to put the redistricting plan to a statewide vote. The 49,773 pages have 305,968 signatures overall, but the filings do not show how many signatures are on the pages being checked.
In other court filings, People Not Politicians has stated that about 103,000 of the signatures were collected before the cutoff date.
Read the article here: https://electionlawblog.org/?p=153771
