Missouri’s Mess: Partisanship and Public Election Administration
The run-up to Election Day has been a chaotic mess in Missouri due to the state’s unhealthy mix of party candidate selection and public elections. Like Maine’s before it, Missouri’s predicament demonstrates the problems that can surface when political parties are allowed to act as private political organizations and public electoral institutions simultaneously.
Last year, as part of the mid-decade redistricting fight, Missouri lawmakers adopted a new congressional map designed to gain an additional seat for Republicans by replacing the boundaries used since 2022. Opponents responded by collecting more than 300,000 signatures seeking a referendum on the new map. Under Missouri’s constitution, a sufficient referendum petition prevents the legislation from taking effect until voters have their say.
The problem was timing.
The referendum organizers submitted their signatures in December 2025. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins did not issue his determination until Aug. 4 of this year, which was both the deadline for him to respond and the day Missouri held its congressional primaries using the newly drawn districts. Hoskins concluded that the referendum was legally insufficient—not because it lacked enough valid signatures, but because, as he argued, congressional redistricting should not be subject to Missouri’s referendum process.
The Missouri Supreme Court unanimously disagreed. On Sept. 3, it ruled that the petition was sufficient and that the 2025 map had therefore never legally taken effect. The court ordered the referendum placed on the November ballot and concluded that the 2022 congressional map remained Missouri law. The court noted that the administrative problems involved resulted not from challenges in implementation but from Hoskins’ own delay.
Supporters of the 2025 map next took their case to federal courts, arguing that Missouri could not hold its primary under one set of congressional districts and its general election under another. A federal district court agreed, and the Eighth Circuit eventually concurred (in direct opposition to the state court’s order) that the 2025 map should govern the November election. The U.S. Supreme Court intervened on Sept. 25, directing the lower federal courts not to prevent Missouri from using the 2022 map. The Court pointed to Hoskins’ actions as the cause for confusion: “[I]n the several-month period before the August primary election, the Missouri Secretary of State was well aware that conducting the August primary election with the 2025 map carried significant risks. The Secretary nonetheless chose to proceed with the 2025 map for the primary.”
As things currently stand, Missouri will hold its November congressional election under the 2022 districts despite having conducted its August primaries under the 2025 districts. Responsibility for re-nominating candidates for the restored districts has fallen to the parties, and it appears that both major parties intend to re-nominate their primary winners—meaning those candidates will compete in districts with different boundaries and voters than those that selected them in August.
While different actions and behaviors could have avoided a great deal of confusion, the results of a political party’s candidate selection process should not factor into any of this in the first place.
As secretary of state, Hoskins is Missouri’s chief election official—not a Republican Party official. Yet his decision to move forward with the new map for the August primaries, despite knowing the map might never legally take effect, helped create the very problem that would later be used to argue for keeping that map in place. Once Republican and Democratic voters had selected their nominees under the new districts, supporters of the map could argue that returning to the old districts would disrupt an election already underway.
That argument results directly from the unnecessary intertwining of two different processes: A primary chooses who will represent a political party, and a general election chooses who will represent the public. Yet we currently administer both as stages of a single public election, with the state conducting the parties’ selection contests and automatically granting their winners privileged access to the general-election ballot.
There is a simpler way.
Political parties should be treated as the private political associations they are. Parties would then be free to select their candidates through a process of their own choosing (though without public funding). However, the parties ought not to be granted special legal privileges, and their endorsement should not grant automatic ballot access. Instead, all candidates should have to meet a single standard to qualify for the ballot. This separates the state’s election administration duties from parties’ nominating contests. It also means a public election is not required for parties to sort out their candidates, giving greater flexibility to handle circumstances like the one facing Missouri now. Moreover, it reduces the ability of individuals like Hoskins to tinker with the administration of a primary election in their party’s interest.
Missouri has clearly demonstrated the danger inherent in these blurred lines. When the government administers internal candidate-selection processes for private political organizations, mistakes or partisan decisions made during those processes can spill directly into the administration of the public election. In this case, partisan decisions resulted in months of litigation over two processes that need not legally depend upon each other.
Candidate selection does not require a public election. Missouri’s mess is just another reason to stop pretending those are the same thing.