Whether congressional elections in Missouri for the November 2026 midterms will be held using districts that never lawfully took effect because they have not been subject to a vote by the people via the referendum process.

Whether congressional elections in Missouri for the November 2026 midterms will be held using districts that never lawfully took effect because they have not been subject to a vote by the people via the referendum process.

In unprecedented fashion, the State of Missouri has redrawn the district lines used for electing members of Congress for a second time this decade. These new district lines are gerrymandered and will harm political representation for all Missourians, particularly Black residents in Kansas City, who have been divided along racial lines.

A coalition of civil rights and immigrant-rights organizations has moved to intervene as defendants in a lawsuit that threatens to dismantle the Constitution’s long-standing requirement that the decennial census count all people living in the United States. Missouri asks the court to exclude undocumented immigrants and people living in the country on temporary visas from the census count used to determine congressional representation—an unprecedented move that would upend more than two centuries of constitutional practice.