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These voters want to overturn Missouri’s new gerrymandered congressional map
Thousands gather to protest the Missouri legislature’s efforts to redraw congressional maps to favor the GOP and amend the initiative petition process on Wednesday, Sept. 10, 2025, at the state Capitol in Jefferson City.
Brian Munoz/St. Louis Public Radio
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Brian Munoz/St. Louis Public Radio
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Lately, on any given day, you’ll find Leann Villaluz knocking on doors around Kansas City to get people to sign a petition that would let voters decide the fate of the state’s new congressional map.
“There’s a sense of resentment, even to regular voters who aren’t as involved,” Villaluz says. “We have to pick up the slack for representatives who have been elected to do their simple duty and carry out the will of the voters. Instead, they think that we don’t know what’s best for ourselves.”
Missouri is the second state in the country, alongside Texas, to gerrymander its congressional map after President Donald Trump set off a nationwide redistricting battle in July to try to maintain control of the U.S. House in the 2026 midterms.
Multiple other states, including North Carolina, Indiana, Florida, Ohio and Kansas could soon follow. California is trying to counter the Republican effort by redistricting in favor of Democrats, if voters pass a constitutional amendment next month.
Missouri’s Republican Governor, Mike Kehoe, signed the new map into law late last month. The state had six Republicans and two Democrats in Congress, but the new plan targets longtime Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II’s seat in Kansas City.
Leann Villaluz (right) has been going door to door for weeks to collect signatures for a petition to put Missouri’s new congressional map to voters. She says most people she’s talked to are willing to sign.
Savannah Hawley-Bates/KCUR
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Savannah Hawley-Bates/KCUR
But with Villaluz and about 3,000 other volunteers, a group called People Not Politicians Missouri is working to overturn the state’s new map. If they’re successful in getting more than 106,000 signatures across the state by December 11, a referendum will go on the ballot in 2026 for voters to decide whether to want to keep or reject it.
The group says it’s already gathered more than 100,000 signatures and is still collecting more. If they get the signatures they need, the referendum would stall the map until voters weigh in next year.
Villaluz says everyone she’s spoken to has been excited to sign. She’s visited five neighborhoods so far around Kansas City, which would be split into three Republican-leaning districts under the new map. Villaluz even took her petition to the recent Chappell Roan concert to get signatures.
“Just about anyone that stops and hears what the petition is about is ready and willing to sign,” Villaluz says. “Whatever your vote is, it’s going to be diluted with the maps, and nobody wants that.”
Missouri attorney general and secretary of state fight back
Not only does People Not Politicians Missouri have to gather enough signatures, it also has to take on pushback from top state election officials. The state’s Attorney General Catherine Hanaway filed a lawsuit in federal court arguing that a referendum on redistricting violates both the U.S. and Missouri constitutions.
Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins did approve the group’s referendum petition this week after initially rejecting it. But in a press release, Hoskins claims that none of the signatures gathered before his approval date are valid.
“The process is clear,” Hoskins said in the release. “Every Missourian deserves confidence that ballot measures follow the law — not out-of-state agendas or confusion campaigns. Missouri values fairness and integrity, and this process reflects that.”
The executive director of People Not Politicians Missouri, Richard von Glahn, said in a statement that Hoskins is “deliberately spreading misinformation for political purposes,” and that, according to the state constitution, the group was allowed to begin gathering signatures before the secretary of state’s approval.
A group called People Not Politicians Missouri has been working to gather signatures to overturn Missouri’s new congressional map. Signers have to leave one column on the petition, their congressional district, blank, because with the map changes, many don’t know which district they’re in.
Savannah Hawley-Bates/KCUR
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Savannah Hawley-Bates/KCUR
“Our campaign has gathered signatures at a historic pace — I’ve never seen Missourians unite and mobilize this quickly,” von Glahn said in the statement. “We will not be intimidated or distracted. This referendum will qualify, and Missourians — not politicians — will decide the future of fair representation in our state.”
The Democratic National Committee has joined the referendum effort and is contributing more staff and money to the cause. A slew of lawsuits have also been filed challenging the new districts.
A legal effort, too
Rebeca Amezcua-Hogan is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit that seeks to block Hoskins from using the map to hold a congressional primary or general election and argues mid-decade redistricting without a new census is unconstitutional.
“My own voting power would be watered down,” Amezcua-Hogan says. “I would feel like I’m not being represented. And I think that at least personally, for the issues that are close to my heart that I’ve been working on for years, it would be incredibly discouraging.”
Amezcua-Hogan is running as a progressive for the Kansas City Council. The area she wants to represent would be split into three different congressional districts if the new map holds. When she talks to voters for her campaign, Amezcua-Hogan is also gathering signatures for the referendum effort.
She says Kansas City is already competing for federal resources and splitting it up into three districts will only make that more difficult.
“Kansas City is already at a point where we’re dealing with lack of affordable housing, lack of mental health resources, lack of transportation,” says Amezcua-Hogan. “It already feels like we’re fighting an uphill battle, and that uphill battle is only going to get worse.”
Most, but not all Republicans, are on board
Lawmakers convene in an extraordinary legislative session at the Missouri State Capitol on Monday, Sept. 8, 2025, in Jefferson City, Mo.
Brian Munoz/St. Louis Public Radio
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Brian Munoz/St. Louis Public Radio
Missouri’s new congressional map easily passed the Republican-dominated Missouri Legislature in its week-long special session.
Michael Davis represents a suburb south of Kansas City and is one of the lawmakers who championed the new map. He’s part of the state’s Freedom Caucus, a group of Republican legislators who aim to push the party further to the right.
Davis says Missourians elected Republican lawmakers because they trust them to do what they think is best with redistricting.
“We should send a conservative message to D.C.,” Davis says. “The best way to do that is by sending seven Republicans who are going to ensure that Republicans keep control of the U.S. House of Representatives.”
But 15 Republicans — including Jon Patterson, the speaker of the Missouri House — voted against the map in the state legislature. Nearly all of them are from parts of the state targeted by redistricting or in areas that would be moved into new districts.
Republican state Rep. Bill Allen represents a part of Kansas City’s northland that is evenly split between parties. He opposes mid-decade redistricting and said he was disappointed that Missouri seemed to follow Texas and Trump’s lead in doing so.
“I think I heard from one or two constituents that wanted me to vote in favor, and almost every other one that I heard was in opposition,” Allen says. “The job of the representative is to represent the district, not the party, certainly not the president. Just the district that I represent, the 39,000 people. Their will is my responsibility.”
Villaluz says she plans to keep gathering signatures for the next two months, until the group finds out if it has done enough to put redistricting on the ballot and potentially reverse Missouri’s gerrymandered map.
“I feel that Missouri is used as a guinea pig by the GOP,” says Villaluz. “They think that the average Missouri voter is dumber than we are, and they think that they can get away with a lot more here in a red flyover state, but that’s not the case.”
Villaluz says voters across Missouri won’t stand idly by, and she believes they’ll get the last word.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks as FBI Director Kash Patel listens during a news conference at the Justice Department on Tuesday in Washington.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
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Jacquelyn Martin/AP
WASHINGTON — The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted Tuesday on federal fraud charges alleging it improperly raised millions of dollars to pay informants to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan and other extremist groups, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said.
The Justice Department alleges the civil rights group defrauded donors by using their money to fund the very extremism it claimed to be fighting, with payments of at least $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to people affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the United Klans of America, the National Socialist Party of America and other extremist groups.
“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Blanche said.
The civil rights group faces charges including wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering in the case brought by the Justice Department in Alabama, where the organization is based.
The indictment came shortly after SPLC revealed the existence of a criminal investigation into its program to pay informants to infiltrate extremist groups and gather information on their activities. The group said the program was used to monitor threats of violence and the information was often shared with local and federal law enforcement.
SPLC CEO Bryan Fair said the organization “will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.”
Blanche said the money was passed from the center through two different bank accounts before being loaded onto prepaid cards to give to the members of the extremist groups, which also included the National Socialist Movement and the Aryan Nations-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club. The group never disclosed to donors details of the informant program, he said.
“They’re required to under the laws associated with a nonprofit to have certain transparency and honesty in what they’re telling donors they’re going to spend money on and what their mission statement is and what they’re raising money doing,” he said.
The indictment includes details on at least nine unnamed informants were paid by the SPLC through a secret program that prosecutors say began in the 1980s. Within the SPLC, they were known as field sources or “the Fs,” according to the indictment. One informant was paid more than $1 million between 2014 and 2023 while affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance, the indictment said. Another was the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America.
The SPLC said the program was kept quiet to protect the safety of informants.
“When we began working with informants, we were living in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system,” Fair said. “There is no question that what we learned from informants saved lives.”
The center has been targeted by Republicans
The SPLC, which is based in Montgomery, Alabama, was founded in 1971 and used civil litigation to fight white supremacist groups. The nonprofit has become a popular target among Republicans who see it as overly leftist and partisan.
The investigation could add to concerns that Trump’s Republican administration is using the Justice Department to go after conservative opponents and his critics. It follows a number of other investigations into Trump foes that have raised questions about whether the law enforcement agency has been turned into a political weapon.
The SPLC has faced intense criticism from conservatives, who have accused it of unfairly maligning right-wing organizations as extremist groups because of their viewpoints. The center regularly condemns Trump’s rhetoric and policies around voting rights, immigration and other issues.
The center came under fresh scrutiny after the assassination last year of conservative activist Charlie Kirk brought renewed attention to its characterization of the group that Kirk founded and led. The center included a section on that group, Turning Point USA, in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024” that described the group as “A Case Study of the Hard Right in 2024.”
FBI Director Kash Patel said last year that the agency was severing its relationship with the center, which had long provided law enforcement with research on hate crime and domestic extremism. Patel said the center had been turned into a “partisan smear machine,” and he accused it of defaming “mainstream Americans” with its “hate map” that documents alleged anti-government and hate groups inside the United States.
House Republicans hosted a hearing centered on the SPLC in December, saying it coordinated efforts with President Joe Biden’s Democratic administration “to target Christian and conservative Americans and deprive them of their constitutional rights to free speech and free association.”
On the night of her resounding win in last fall’s election for Virginia governor, Abigail Spanberger told her supporters that they had sent a message to the world. “Virginia,” she said in the opening lines of her victory speech, “chose pragmatism over partisanship.”
But even then it was clear that the first big issue of her term would be as partisan as it gets: a proposed amendment by her fellow Democrats to allow them to gerrymander the state’s 11 congressional districts.
The push to redraw the Virginia map was another salvo in a barrage of redistricting spurred by President Trump in a bid to keep Republicans in control of the House in this year’s midterm elections.
Virginians vote on Tuesday on whether to adopt the proposed map, and if the “Yes” vote wins, Democrats could end up with as many as 10 seats, up from the six they hold now. The redistricting battles of the last year would end up in something of a draw, with gains for Democrats in California and Virginia offsetting gains for Republicans in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina — unless Florida lawmakers decide in the coming weeks to draw a new, more Republican-friendly map.
Historically, redrawing of congressional maps has been done each decade after the U.S. census. But with Republicans holding such a slim majority in the House, Mr. Trump began by pressing Texas to redraw its maps, touching off the wave of gerrymandering
Virginia Democratic legislators rolled out their redistricting plan last October, setting in motion the state’s lengthy amendment process just as the campaign for governor was entering its final weeks. At the time, Ms. Spanberger expressed support for the plan, though she emphasized that its passage was up to the legislature and then to the voters.
But even if her formal role in the process was relatively minor — Ms. Spanberger signed the bill setting the date for the referendum — the politics of the effort has loomed over the first few months of her term. Her support for the amendment has drawn accusations of hypocrisy from the right and complaints from some on the left that she has not been outspoken enough in her advocacy.
“There’s always going to be somebody who wants me to do something differently,” the governor said in an interview on Saturday at a rally in support of the amendment outside a home in Northern Virginia. “I will always make someone unhappy, and I will always make someone happy.”
Ms. Spanberger, a former C.I.A. officer and three-term congresswoman, won a 15-point victory in 2025 after running on a campaign focused on pocketbook issues. Centrism has been her political brand since she was first elected to the House in 2018, flipping a district that had long leaned to the right.
Now Republicans campaigning against the amendment have made Ms. Spanberger a prime target, deriding her as “Governor Bait-and-Switch” and highlighting an interview in August 2025 in which she said she had “no plans to redistrict Virginia.”
“This was the perfect opportunity for her to show that she is the middle-of-the-road suburban mom that she portrayed herself as,” said Glen Sturtevant, a Republican state senator. He dismissed the notion that this was an effort that had been thrust upon her, pointing out that she had signed the bill setting the date for the referendum. “She is certainly an active participant in this whole process,” he said.
Republicans have eagerly highlighted recent polls suggesting that Ms. Spanberger’s honeymoon is over, though because governors in Virginia cannot serve two consecutive terms, public approval is less of a pressure point than it might be elsewhere. Some of her political adversaries have tied the drop in her ratings to her involvement in the campaign for the amendment.
But a number of factors are at play in those sagging poll numbers. Some on the right are irked by her support of standard Democratic priorities like gun control measures and limits to cooperation with federal immigration agents.
But some of the most vociferous criticism of her from Republicans, up to and including the president, has been for a host of proposed taxes and tax hikes in the legislature — on everything from dog grooming to dry cleaning — that she in fact had nothing do with. Most of those taxes, which were floated by various lawmakers, never even came up for a vote.
But Ms. Spanberger did not publicly hit back against these attacks until recent days, a delay that some Democrats say was costly.
“She let other people define her,” said Scott Surovell, the State Senate majority leader.
Mr. Surovell’s frustration echoed a growing discontent among Democrats about the governor’s recent moves. For all the Republican criticism of her, some operatives and lawmakers said, Ms. Spanberger has not been aggressive enough in pushing for Democratic priorities, redistricting among them.
This criticism broke out into the open in recent days, after the governor made scores of amendments to bills that had passed the General Assembly. Some lawmakers and Democratic allies accused her of unexpectedly diluting long-sought goals like expanded public sector unions and a legal retail marketplace for cannabis.
“Our party base is looking for us to stand up and fight and advocate and deliver,” said Mr. Surovell, who represents a solidly Democratic district in Northern Virginia. “It’s hard to deliver when you’re standing in the middle of the road.”
In the interview, Ms. Spanberger insisted that she supported the purpose of many of the bills but had to make amendments to ensure that her administration could implement them.
And she said she had been explicit in her support of the redistricting effort, appearing in statewide TV ads encouraging people to vote “Yes” even as an anti-amendment campaign has sent out mailers suggesting that the governor opposes the effort.
But she said she had never been in a position to barnstorm the state as Gov. Gavin Newsom did in the months leading up to the redistricting referendum that passed in California. Mr. Newsom is a second-term governor in a much bluer state, she said, while she only recently took office and has been “in the crush of their legislative session,” with hundreds of bills to read and examine in a short period.
“Those who may not be focused on the governing and only on the politics, they’re going to want me to do politics 100 percent of the time,” she said. “And for people who care about the governing and not the politics, they’re going to want me to do governing 100 percent of the time.”
Her preference, as she has often made apparent, is for the governing over the politicking. But she acknowledged that it is all part of the job.
Asked if she lamented that the highest-profile issue of her term so far was such a polarizing matter, rather than the cost-of-living policies she emphasized on the campaign trail, she said: “Any person in elected office wants to talk about the thing they want to talk about all the time, and that’s it. So I won’t say ‘No’ to that question.”
new video loaded: Singer D4vd Is Charged With Murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez
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Singer D4vd Is Charged With Murder of Celeste Rivas Hernandez
The musician D4vd was charged with murder on Monday, seven months after the police said that the body of a teenage girl, Celeste Rivas Hernandez, had been found in the trunk of his Tesla. D4vd, whose real name is David Burke, pleaded not guilty to the charges.
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“On April 23, 2025, as has been alleged by the complaint, Celeste, a 14-year-old at that time, went to Mr. Burke’s house in the Hollywood Hills. She was never heard from again.” “These charges include the most serious charges that a D.A.‘s office can bring. That is first-degree murder with special circumstances. The special circumstances being lying in wait, committing this crime for financial gain or murdering a witness in an investigation. These special circumstances carry with it, along with the first-degree murder charge, a maximum sentence of life without the possibility of parole, or the death penalty.” “We believe the actual evidence will show David Burke did not murder Celeste Revis Hernandez nor was he the cause of her death.”
By Jackeline Luna
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