By: Jason Hancock
Missouri Independent
The campaign to repeal Missouri’s newly gerrymandered congressional map says it will turn in signatures to put the issue on the statewide ballot next week.
If enough signatures were collected, the map will be placed on hold until voters decide its fate at the ballot box next year.
“This unprecedented show of grassroots power signals the overwhelming public demand for Missourians to have a say in whether (the map) becomes law,” People Not Politicians, the political action committee behind the referendum campaign, said in a statement Wednesday.
The new map was crafted at the urging of President Donald Trump in order to give Republicans control of seven of Missouri’s eight seats in Congress. To do it, GOP lawmakers broke up the Kansas City-based 5th District represented by Democrat Emanuel Cleaver.
Soon after lawmakers passed the map, People Not Politicians submitted paperwork for a referendum to the Missouri secretary of state. Since then, the group has raised millions of dollars — mostly from out-of-state nonprofits who don’t have to disclose their donors — and reportedly collected more than 200,000 signatures.
To succeed, a referendum petition must have at least 106,000 signatures from registered voters distributed among six of the state’s eight congressional districts.
From the moment the referendum campaign launched, Republicans have worked overtime to undermine it.
Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a first-term Republican, announced he would not accept any signatures collected before the governor signed the new map into law, a move that would invalidate more than 90,000 signatures. A Cole County judge is scheduled to hear arguments over that decision next week.
Hoskins is also in court defending the ballot summary he wrote for the referendum in which he says the map “better reflects statewide voting patterns” and replaces a “gerrymandered” version that “protects incumbent politicians.”
Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, a Republican appointed to the position in September, filed a federal lawsuit arguing that even though the congressional map is a piece of legislation approved by the General Assembly, it should not be subject to a citizen referendum.
Hanaway has also accused a company hired by People Not Politicians to collect signatures of bringing undocumented immigrants into the state to assist with the campaign. The attorney general has presented no evidence to support this claim, and the company has adamantly denied it.
The company, Advanced Micro Targeting, filed a federal lawsuit alleging four Republican consulting firms are involved in an effort to pay the company’s employees to abandon their work, turn over any signatures they gathered and badmouth the company — all to sabotage the petition drive.
The Republican National Committee has bombarded Missourians with text messages attacking the referendum campaign. And on Wednesday, the president’s son — Donald Trump Jr. — called People Not Politicians Director Richard Von Glahn a “leftist nut” on social media, drawing a response from the Missouri Republican Party accusing Von Glahn of being a “communist.”
Trump Jr.’s social media post also caused a pile on by accounts that appear to be based overseas.
