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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.
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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.
The maker of Canvas, the software used by thousands of schools and universities around the world, said on Monday that it had reached a deal with the hackers that recently breached its systems for the return of stolen data and the destruction of any copies.
ShinyHunters, a hacking group, had claimed responsibility for the attack on Instructure, the Salt Lake City-based company that provides Canvas to about half of all colleges and universities in North America.
The hackers said they had accessed the data of more than 275 million users at nearly 9,000 schools worldwide, including private conversations between students and teachers as well as personal identifying information such as names and email addresses. Canvas was shut down for hours after the cyberattack on Thursday.
The agreement, Instructure said in a statement, involved the return of the stolen data and confirmation that the data had been destroyed at the hackers’ end. Instructure added that it had been informed that none of its customers would face extortion as a result of the theft.
“While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cybercriminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible,” the company said.
Instructure did not say what it had given the hackers in exchange for the return of the data. The company did not immediately respond to questions about the deal.
Canvas has more than 30 million active users around the world, according to Instructure. The platform is used by teachers and students for coursework management and communications. Instructure said the data compromised in the hack included usernames, email addresses, course names, enrollment information and messages.
ShinyHunters on Thursday claimed the attack in a message that appeared on students’ Canvas pages and was obtained by The New York Times. The group warned that it would leak an unspecified amount of data on May 12 if it did not receive a response from Instructure. In its May 3 ransom note, the group had threatened to leak “several billions of private messages among students and teachers.”
Not much is known about ShinyHunters, which is believed to have been formed around 2020. Its goal appears to be to obtain personal records and sell them. One of its high-profile attacks was against Ticketmaster in 2024, when the hackers said they had stolen the user information of more than 500 million customers.
Instructure said it first detected unauthorized activity in Canvas on Apr. 29, and again on May 7. The company said it took Canvas offline to investigate the breach, and also informed the F.B.I., the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and other international law enforcement partners.
Instructure did not immediately respond to questions about whether any law enforcement agencies were involved in its dealings with the hackers. The F.B.I. advises against paying ransom to hackers, saying it does not guarantee data security and encourages attackers to target more victims.
The National Quarantine Center is located at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha.
Nebraska Medicine
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Nebraska Medicine
Sixteen of the 18 passengers transferred to the U.S. from a cruise ship where there was an outbreak of hantavirus arrived in Omaha, Neb., on Monday for evaluation after disembarking the vessel in Spain’s Canary Islands over the weekend.
Of the 15 U.S. citizens and one dual U.S.-British citizen who arrived in Nebraska, all but one are currently being housed in the National Quarantine Unit. That patient tested positive for the virus and was being housed in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit, officials said at a Monday news conference. The 15 people in the quarantine unit will continue to be monitored for signs of the illness.
Passengers carry their belongings in plastic bags after being evacuated from the MV Hondius after docking in the Granadilla Port on Sunday in Tenerife, part of the Canary Islands, Spain.
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Chris McGrath/Getty Images
Nebraska may seem an unlikely location to process these individuals, but it is home to the National Quarantine Unit — the only federally funded quarantine unit in the U.S. — and the separate Nebraska Biocontainment Unit. They are highly specialized facilities located at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) and widely considered among the best in the world.
The $1 million, five-room biocontainment unit was dedicated in 2005. It was a joint project with Nebraska Health and Human Services and the UNMC. It is set up to safely provide medical care for patients with highly hazardous and infectious diseases and was used in 2014 to treat two doctors infected with Ebola. The National Quarantine Unit was completed in late 2019. It cost nearly $20 million, according to the Associated Press. Both facilities were used during the COVID-19 epidemic.
“We are prepared for situations exactly like this,” Dr. Michael Ash, CEO of Nebraska Medicine, said in a statement. “Our teams have trained for decades alongside federal and state partners to make sure we can safely provide care while protecting our staff and the broader community. We are proud to support this national effort.”
Two additional U.S. passengers on the cruise ship — a couple, with one showing symptoms of hantavirus — were transferred for monitoring to Emory University Hospital, where another advanced biocontainment facility is located.
When the biocontainment unit was first dedicated more than 20 years ago, the biggest concerns were anthrax attacks and severe acute respiratory syndrome, more commonly known as SARS, Dr. Phil Smith, who spearheaded the efforts at Nebraska Medical Center to create the biocontainment unit, told the AP in 2020. Smith died last year.
A hallway leading to rooms at the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
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Nebraska Medicine
The quarantine unit features 20 negative-pressure rooms designed to keep potentially harmful particles from escaping by maintaining lower air pressure inside than outside the rooms. The single-occupancy rooms provide patients with attached bathrooms, exercise equipment and Wi-Fi, according to the medical center.
“We have protocols in the quarantine unit that provide for safe care of these of these persons, including just all the activities of daily living so that they can … have a comfortable stay but also have it in an area that’s protected and limits spread of the pathogen,” Dr. Michael Wadman, the medical director of the National Quarantine Unit, said at a Friday news conference.
The biocontainment unit, by contrast, is a patient-care space where people are able to receive medical treatment, Dr. Angela Hewlett, medical director of the biocontainment unit, told reporters Monday.
She emphasized that the facility — which has a 10-bed capacity — operates independently from the quarantine unit and has its own dedicated air-handling system. “We don’t share [it] with any of the rest of the facility,” she said, noting that the unit uses rooftop HEPA filtration and is designed “very differently” from what most people typically imagine in a hospital setting.
One of the rooms in the Nebraska Biocontainment Unit.
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Nebraska Medicine
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, speaking at Monday’s news conference, welcomed the recently arrived patients, who are among nearly 150 people from 23 different countries who were aboard the MV Hondius when the illness most commonly transmitted to humans through contact with infected rodents broke out. As of Monday, the World Health Organization has reported at least nine cases of hantavirus, including three deaths.
“We’re glad that you’re here,” Pillen said. “We’re going to ensure that you have the best world-class care possible.”
Pillen also sought to reassure Nebraskans that the facilities are safe and secure: “We’re working diligently to ensure no one leaves the security in an unsecured way at an inappropriate time,” he said. “No one poses a risk to public health, just walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha.”
The hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship has been identified as the Andes strain of the illness, one that can be spread, though rarely, from person-to-person, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It can cause severe respiratory disease, with early flu-like symptoms.
“The Andes variant of this virus does not spread easily, and it requires prolonged, close contact with someone who is already symptomatic,” according to Adm. Brian Christine, the assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, who spoke at Monday’s news conference. “Even so, we have taken this situation very seriously from the very start.”
“The risk of hantavirus to the general public remains very, very low,” he said.
The full quarantine period for hantavirus is 42 days, Christine said, but he added that the patients would be allowed to go home if they remained asymptomatic.
“Right now, the passengers that are all in the assessment phase — they’re going to be here for at least a few days while we do assessments and the coordination on what happens next,” he said, adding that they had the option to remain in the quarantine facility for the full period, for “the safest and most effective option for them.”
new video loaded: Americans Exposed to Hantavirus on Cruise Ship Arrive in United States
transcript
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Americans Exposed to Hantavirus on Cruise Ship Arrive in United States
Eighteen passengers who were aboard the MV Hondius, a cruise ship with a deadly hantavirus outbreak, landed in Omaha on a U.S. government medical flight. The passengers were being monitored at medical facilities in Nebraska and Georgia.
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We’re working diligently to ensure no one leaves the security in an unsecured way at an inappropriate time. No one who poses a risk to public health is walking out the front door of the streets of Omaha or beyond.
By Axel Boada
May 11, 2026
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