Citizens Invited to Congressional Redistricting Meeting Tuesday in Jeff City

(Jefferson City) While the latest Census data won’t be available until September, the Missouri House has already begun its work to redraw Missouri’s congressional district lines.

The Missouri General Assembly will draw and approve new congressional districts in order to ensure proper filing by February 2022 for congressional district candidates.

State Representatives Rick Francis, Mike Henderson and Dale Wright are encouraging their constituents to participate in a legislative hearing to discuss the boundaries for Missouri’s 8th Congressional District.

The House Special Committee on Redistricting will hold the hearing Tuesday morning at 8 in Hearing Room 6 in the Missouri Capitol building.

The committee will spend the next several months working on the once-a-decade process that will revise boundary lines based on population shifts revealed in the latest Census data.

The committee will accept in-person and written testimonies from members of the public.

In 2018, Missouri voters enacted a first-of-its-kind initiative intended to create partisan fairness in voting districts but last year, after Republican legislators placed another similar vote on the ballot, Missourians did the opposite.

Before the new measure could be used, voters reversed key parts of it in the 2020 election.

They opted instead to return to the old method that will let commissions composed of Democratic and Republican loyalists redraw the districts.