Jan. 8, 2026, 5:05 PM EST | By Ja’han Jones
A legal filing shows the Republican secretary of state blocked a third of signatures in support of a referendum on new, Trump-backed, gerrymandered districts.
Missouri’s Republican secretary of state is refusing to count nearly a third of the pages of petition signatures his office received from a group seeking a statewide vote on a newly gerrymandered congressional map.
The map, which was redrawn at President Donald Trump’s urging, is designed to shore up Republicans’ chances of keeping control of the U.S. House in this year’s midterms and achieves this largely by diluting the voting power of Black communities. Missouri Republicans have pulled out all the stops in their effort to prevent voters from having a chance to weigh in, including an investigation launched by the state’s attorney general over unsubstantiated allegations about a group involved in obtaining signatures for the petition.
We now have a new ripple to the story, after Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’ recent rejection. As the Missouri Independent reported:
The information was revealed as part of a related case making its way through the state court system. The Missouri Independent noted that the judge overseeing this case has said he won’t issue a ruling on the signatures “until the verification process shows whether the referendum petition can succeed without signatures collected before Oct. 14.”
Hoskins previously told The Associated Press that he was “going to do everything I can to protect” the gerrymandered map. And it’s fair to assume his rejection of thousands of signatures is connected to that vow.
Read the article here: https://www.ms.now/opinion/missouri-gerrymander-petition-secretary-of-state-blocks-signatures