Missourians living overseas began receiving their ballots Friday despite continuing uncertainty over which congressional candidates should be listed on them.
Military personnel and other eligible Missourians outside the United States can receive ballots electronically or by regular mail, with military members in combat zones able to return voted ballots directly through a portal maintained by the Secretary of State’s office.
Federal law directs election authorities to send the emails and post the envelopes by Friday, the last business day before the 45th day before the election.
And while those deliveries were going out, and other work necessary to conduct the election continued around the state, officials in 28 counties were looking to the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis for a decision on the congressional district map. A three-judge panel on Thursday heard arguments from U.S. Rep. Bob Onder, state Sen. Rick Brattin and Secretary of State Denny Hoskins that the correct map for November is the gerrymandered plan drawn in 2025 to favor Republicans in seven of Missouri’s eight districts.
Brattin is the GOP nominee in the 5th District, the one targeted by Republicans. A lawsuit filed Thursday in Jefferson City seeks to kick him off the ballot because the district lines changed, but no action is scheduled in the case until after the election.
The 8th Circuit did not rule Friday. Any decision it does reach is certain to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. The nation’s highest court has already acted twice to sustain the Missouri Supreme Court’s ruling that the legal map for November is the one passed in 2022 and used for two most recent elections.
The gerrymandered 2025 map was used in the Aug. 3 primary. But the Missouri Supreme Court’s Sept. 3 ruling that the referendum petition from the political action committee People Not Politicians was legal, sufficient and timely meant the 2022 map would govern the general election. The court said the 2025 map “is not the law and has never been the law.”
The referendum will be Proposition A on the Nov. 3 ballot. Republicans will say it reflects the state and seek a “yes” vote while People Not Politicians will call it a power grab and ask for a “no” vote.
Through a flurry of legal filings and hearings in state and federal court, election officials and voters waited in limbo. The district lines changed three times, from the 2025 map to the 2022 map, back to the 2025 map and, currently, to the 2022 map, between Sept. 3 and Sept. 10.
A fourth, or even a fifth change, would mean about a week of overtime to catch up, election officials said Friday.
St. Charles County Elections Director Kurt Bahr is still behind because he had to wait until Sept. 10 to give directions to the vendor that prepares his ballots and get other preparations completed. Military personnel who vote through the portal received notices Friday that their ballots were ready, while the emails and envelopes will go out Monday, Bahr said.
If the district lines change again, he said, it will switch about 80,000 voters back to the districts used in August, he said. And it means there is no chance that he will be ready for absentee voting to begin on Tuesday, as required by state law.
Working in a rush, Bahr said, the county’s vendor “said he would expect it to take five to seven days to get a turnaround for all of his customers across the state.”
St. Charles County is split between the 2nd and 3rd districts. If the 2025 map is used, all St. Charles County voters would be in the 3rd District. Onder is a resident of St. Charles County. He advocated for a map that put the whole county in one district as a state senator and got the ear of President Donald Trump in July 2025 to begin the push to redraw district lines.
The later an order to change maps comes, Bahr said, the bigger the issues become. Ballots will be mailed Tuesday to voters with a standing request for an absentee ballot. That is the day that local election authorities across Missouri must be ready to accept voted ballots from people who know they will not be able to get to the polls on Election Day.
Officials can notify anyone who has already received a ballot that a replacement is available, Bahr said. But ballots that have been cast cannot be uncast.
“If somebody gets a ballot quickly, responds and votes quickly, once it’s received by the elections office, that vote is cast,” Bahr said. “At that point they don’t have an opportunity to vote the correct ballot.”
Next door in St. Louis County, about 60,000 voters would change between the 1st and 2nd districts in a late order reviving the 2025 map. The county Board of Election Commissioners sent about 1,500 ballots to overseas voters, said Eric Fey, Democratic director of elections.
He’s not sure how the county would react to an order to change maps, he said.
“We’d have to figure out a way to communicate with them and speak with our legal counsel about what, if anything, we could do,” Fey said.
The delays before the map returned to the 2022 lines on Sept. 10 taught the board how quickly it could get new ballots ready if voters had to be switched between districts, Fey said.
“We learned if we work expeditiously, we can program the election and get it proofed and ready to go in about four to five days,” Fey said.
In Boone County, where about 50,000 voters would move from the 3rd and 4th districts to the 3rd and 5th districts, the total of overseas ballots sent Friday was 115, County Clerk Brianna Lennon said.
Running an election is more than making a document and printing a ballot, Lennon said.
The machines that read ballots and tabulate the votes, the computer codes that link addresses to voting districts, and, finally, mass printing of ballots, all must be ready before the first votes are cast Tuesday, she said. That is the day that absentee voting begins for people who know they will not be able to get to the polls on Nov. 3.
“My concern is, now that we’re to the point of having the ballots, all of those processes that we did are really hard to undo and redo,” Lennon said.
Even if officials can alert anyone who receives a ballot that it is no longer valid, it doesn’t help anyone who votes immediately, Lennon said.
“You cannot pull a voted ballot back out of a tabulator and redo it,” she said. “You have voted your ballot; you are done.”
Most voters don’t follow the back-and-forth over the map, Fey said. They want the issue settled so they can focus on the candidates, he said.
“The public is a little bit baffled and frustrated by this whole process,” he said. “Most people are not totally plugged into all the inside baseball of what actors did what in this case, and what courts did what. It just seems chaotic to a lot of regular voters.”
This piece originally published in The Missouri Independent.
