Jefferson City – The Missouri Supreme Court announced Friday evening that oral arguments will take place May 12 in an appeal of a lower court’s decision to deny a request to suspend House Bill 1’s new congressional maps until after a vote of the people. The lawsuit was filed by the ACLU of Missouri on behalf of two Jackson County registered voters.
“The lower court’s decision ignores over a century of judicial precedent upholding our constitutional right to referendum by allowing legislation to go into effect before the People have an opportunity to vote on it,” said Tori Schafer, Director of Policy and Campaigns at the ACLU of Missouri. “Local election officials have already verified that the referendum has received enough signatures. Missourians have an urgent need to know the operative district boundaries for which they will vote. The constitutional right to a referendum cannot be set aside to accommodate the whims of those in Washington, D.C.”
Secretary of state Denny Hoskins confirmed his delay tactic as a means of bypassing Missouri voters and implementing the map by promising a ‘slow and steady’ review of the signatures and telling the Associated Press that he is “going to do everything [he] can to protect” HB1’s map. His position, if successful in court, presents a real possibility that an unlawful congressional map would be used in the 2026 midterms before voters have an opportunity to exercise their referendum right.
The lower court’s order departs from over one hundred years of legal precedent dating back to the early 1900’s. Time and time again, courts found and upheld that “the mere lodging of a timely, legal, and sufficient referendum petition with the Secretary of State is all that” must be done to “halt” the “law affected”—“regardless of any affirmative act on the part of the Secretary of State or the Attorney General.”
Previous Secretaries of State and Attorneys General have agreed with the established precedent that referred legislation is suspended upon receipt of the referendum petition. In 2017, then-Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft announced that Missouri’s so-called right-to-work law was suspended after his office received more than 300,000 signatures, even though the office still needed to verify and issue a certificate.
Read full motion to expedite.