Missouri election officials can’t revise voter rolls to reflect the state’s gerrymandered congressional map because Secretary of State Denny Hoskins’ office has not opened the statewide voter registration system to accept the changes, the president of Missouri’s county clerks association said Thursday.
Miller County Clerk Clinton Jenkins, a Republican who serves as president of the Missouri Association of County Clerks and Election Authorities, said he and every other county clerk and election board are waiting on Hoskins on how to proceed amid uncertainty over a pending referendum petition.
And, Jenkins said, he’s not ready to second-guess Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon, who said she won’t update her voter rolls until Hoskins says whether a referendum petition has enough signatures to put the map before voters.
“I am a Third Class County clerk, and I am not a genius, and she is a lawyer, and I am not going to dispute what she is saying,” said Jenkins, who has been in office since 2015.
Lennon, in a letter to Hoskins on Wednesday, said the Missouri Supreme Court ruling that the measure creating the maps could be suspended retroactively if the referendum is certified to be on the ballot makes it impossible to know which districts should be used in upcoming elections.
The uncertainty of the district lines stems from the way the court wrote its Tuesday ruling.
Passage of the new maps in the September special session triggered opponents to move on two tracks — challenging the changes in court and a petition drive for a referendum by the political action committee People Not Politicians.
The referendum petitions, with more than 300,000 signatures, were delivered to Hoskins on Dec. 9, two days before the measure was to take effect.
Under the Missouri Constitution, a referendum filing suspends enforcement of a new enactment until a statewide vote. In its decision, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the suspension does not occur until the signatures are verified as valid in an official action by Hoskins.
If he does find the petitions have enough signatures, enforcement of the bill revising the maps would be suspended retroactively to the day the signatures were delivered, the court ruled.
Because Hoskins has until Aug. 4 — the day of this year’s primary — to issue a decision about the referendum, the districts used for the primary could be changed as people are voting. Hoskins has said he intends to use most, if not all, of the time allowed.
On Thursday, he sent a letter to the state’s 116 local election authorities, accompanied by an opinion from Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway, that the court’s decision means the new map is in effect for the primary.
Hoskins thanked officials who have begun the work to reassign voters and said more information would be forthcoming.
The purpose of the map, passed to replace the plan approved in 2022, is to create a safe Republican district in order to oust 11-term 5th District U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Kansas City. A portion of Boone County, along with all of 13 rural counties, was added to Cleaver’s district while portions of Jackson and Clay counties were cut out of it.
Lennon, a Democrat, has said she must alter the district assignments for 45% of the 130,000 registered voters in the county.
Hoskins, Hanaway, and candidates seeking the Republican nomination in the 5th District denounced Lennon’s actions as illegal and threatened action to force her to update the county voter rolls.
Hanaway, in a radio interview, said she may take legal action against Lennon.
“I have lots of thoughts about what the civil and criminal penalties are for a clerk who does not use the appropriate congressional maps,” Hanaway said during an appearance on Wake Up Missouri on radio station KSSZ in Columbia. “And I think we will be having some communications with her about that.”
State Sen. Rick Brattin, a Cass County Republican making his second bid for Congress, filed a remonstrance against Lennon in the state Senate. He demanded that she reverse her decision by 6 p.m. Wednesday or he would ask Hanaway and Boone County Prosecuting Attorney Roger Johnson to take action against her.
“It should anger everyone regardless of political party,” Brattin said.
State Sen. Stephen Webber, a Columbia Democrat, defended Lennon.
“She conducts herself with integrity, and she takes her job very, very seriously,” Webber said, “and she’s very, very professional about it.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling “means that it is actually really impossible for local county elected officials right now to know what maps are in effect,” Webber said.
And Taylor Burks, who Lennon defeated in 2018 to become county clerk, called on her to resign. Burks is running in the 5th District GOP primary in his third bid for a seat in Congress. He ran fourth in the 2022 Republican primary in the 4th District and briefly entered, but withdrew, from the primary for the 3rd District in 2024.
“Using her office to engage in partisan tactics undermines confidence in our election system,” Burks said in a social media post.
The changes to district lines in the map passed last year weren’t confined to the 5th District. The revisions touched five more of Missouri’s eight congressional districts. Officials in 30 of Missouri’s 116 local election authorities must alter voter assignments by May 26 to implement the new maps for the Aug. 4 primary.
To update the voter district assignments, local election officials first must have mapping files of the new districts, which Lennon and other officials interviewed on Thursday said they have received from the state Office of Administration.
To finalize the new assignments, they said, the data must be transformed into actual maps. In places where the map lines split counties, detailed work must be done to determine whether the boundaries cut through neighborhoods or even through individual residences.
The final action is to upload the new assignments to the voter database maintained by Hoskins’ office.
So far, Lennon, Jenkins, and Kansas City Elections Director Shawn Kieffer said Hoskins’ office has not prepared the voter database to receive uploads.
In his letter to election officials, Hoskins did not give a date when the voter database would be ready to accept updates.
The Kansas City Board of Election Commissioners must reassign more than 100,000 voters in 163 of the 436 precincts in the Jackson County portion of the city, Kieffer said.
The area in the board’s jurisdiction was all in the 5th District prior to the new map, Kieffer said, and now the city is split among three districts. Some of the lines split existing precincts, he said, and, like Boone County, the work is done house-by-house in a painstaking review of where the lines fall.
Kieffer said Hoskins hasn’t given local officials a firm directive to start that process.
On Thursday morning, Kieffer said he was uncertain whether the Kansas City board would join Lennon in refusing to update the voter assignments until Hoskins rules on the referendum petition are an open question.
Late Thursday, the Kansas City Star reported that the board was preparing to make the changes necessary to implement the new map.
During the regular redistricting done in 2022, Lennon said, the voter database was ready to accept updates as soon as lawmakers finished work on the map on May 11, 2022.
“By this point in the year in 2022, we were done redistricting,” Lennon said in an interview Thursday.
Miller County is moving from the 3rd District to the 5th District, and Jenkins also said he needs a directive from Hoskins to start changing voter assignments.
“We are just waiting patiently for some kind of guidance, and it is not really forthcoming,” he said.
Communication with Hoskins has been poor since he took over the secretary of state’s office in 2025, Jenkins said.
He said he’s asked for a chance to meet with Hoskins or to have him meet with the board of the association. It has not happened, he said.
“As president, I’ve tried to build some line of communication between clerks and the secretary of state’s office. It has just never materialized,” Jenkins said. “I am to the point where I am saying to hell with it because we don’t have any relationship with Denny.”
This article was updated at 9:45 May 15 to correct the number of times Brattin has run for Congress.
Missouri Independent, part of States Newsroom, originally published this story on May 15, 2025, at 5:50 a.m.
