A week after the Missouri legislature passed a new congressional map meant to give Republicans a 6–1 majority in the U.S. House, Gov. Mike Kehoe is rebutting claims by lawyers that an error in the map not only gives 875 Missourians two congressional votes but that it might be grounds for a judge to reject the whole map. He says he will sign the map into law.
The claim of the duplicated district is getting significant attention online and, more importantly, in a lawsuit brought by the ACLU of Missouri seeking to stop the new map’s implementation. In short, the bill detailing the new congressional map divides the state by voting tabulation districts. One of those VTDs—Kansas City 811—is listed as being in both the newly drawn fourth and fifth congressional districts.
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The lawsuit filed by the ACLU says that KC 811 is one non-contiguous district—meaning it has two parts that do not touch—containing 875 voters. But Kehoe spokeswoman Gabby Picard issued a statement Wednesday night stating that KC 811 is not a single, non-contiguous district. Instead, the statement said, there are two separate and distinct Kansas City-area VTDs with the 811 designation, one with 843 voters and another with 32. The duplicative naming issue is likely the fault of the U.S. Census Bureau, said Kehoe’s office.
“Any suggestion that someone could vote in two congressional districts is false,” she said. “The entire source of confusion is due to the existence of two entirely different VTDs using the same number.” The statement added that one VTD 811 is in the new fourth congressional district. The other VTD 811 is in the new fifth.
The governor’s office took the unusual step of commenting on the matter despite the pending litigation, citing a discussion they said was “so inaccurate” that they had to deviate from the norm. The governor’s office also blasted the ACLU lawsuit as being backed by dark money.
Tom Bastian, speaking on behalf of the ACLU of Missouri, tells SLM that the governor is the one “in the shadows with people in D.C.” on the redistricting project. He says the fault lies solely with the governor for rushing the map through the legislature in a mere week and a half, during which time no detailed electronic file of the new map was made available to those who would be voting on it. “Both the governor and legislature failed to address oversights that previous mapmakers did, highlighting their careless approach to representation in our state,” he said. “We will see you in court.”
Democratic election lawyer Chuck Hatfield is pursuing a different lawsuit seeking to stop implementation of the new map that doesn’t rely on the argument of the duplicated VTD, but he believes the argument has merit.
He says that he buys the argument about the duplicative VTDs, but only to a point. “I bet factually that’s what happened,” he says of the likely Census Bureau snafu. “But legally KC811 is in two different CDs.”
Kehoe’s statement did state that the new map “properly placed” one VTD 811 in the new fourth district and one in the new fifth. However, Hatfield says, the bill doesn’t distinguish which is in which.
And while it’s easy enough to infer which 811 was intended to be in which new district, “We don’t really do what the legislature meant; we go with the words on the page,” Hatfield says.
All of this is playing out against the backdrop of a ticking clock. The next hearing in the ACLU’s lawsuit isn’t until the end of December. Candidates hoping to run for Congress in the 2026 midterms have until the end of March to file for office.
