JD Vance weighs in on Missouri’s redistricting mess

Good morning,

Vice President JD Vance came to Kansas City on Monday and was asked about Missouri’s congressional redistricting mess.

What struck him as particularly strange, he said, was that voters used one set of congressional districts in the August primary and are now on course to use another in November.

“That doesn’t make a ton of sense to me,” Vance told reporters, arguing that changing maps between elections is an “affront to the democratic process.”

What Vance did not mention was how Missouri got there.

Secretary of State Denny Hoskins could have ruled on the referendum challenging the new map eight months earlier. Instead, the Missouri Supreme Court noted in a unanimous ruling, Hoskins waited until about an hour before the deadline on Aug. 4 — the day of the primary — to declare the referendum invalid.

The court reversed him, ruling the referendum legal and saying Hoskins’ delay helped create the logistical problems that followed.

Hoskins attended Vance’s Kansas City visit Monday. Two hours east in Jefferson City, his stewardship of Missouri elections was under scrutiny for another reason.

Nick La Strada, whom Hoskins fired as his director of election integrity in May, filed a lawsuit accusing his former boss and senior staff of altering local election results, trying to manufacture evidence for a federal voting case and improperly using state resources in a local election.

It is the second lawsuit filed against Hoskins in recent days over his actions in office.

Rudi Keller has the details.