KC residents lament questions on new MO voting map: ‘I don’t know where I am’
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- Some residents of a KC neighborhood said they were confused about their voting district.
- The neighborhood had appeared to be in two districts in Missouri’s new gerrymandered map.
- The state’s new Republican-drawn map was upheld by the Missouri Supreme Court Tuesday.
Missouri’s redistricting push ahead of the 2026 midterm elections has left Jennifer Roe and others in her Kansas City neighborhood baffled, even months after Gov. Mike Kehoe signed the map into law last year.
Roe, 51, lives in the 700 block of East 71st Terrace in the heart of a voting precinct that became a point in a legal challenge to the gerrymandered map after it appeared the area had been assigned to both the newly crafted 4th and 5th congressional districts.
After the Missouri Supreme Court upheld the state’s congressional map in a ruling Tuesday, some Kansas Citians in Roe’s neighborhood off Troost Avenue felt left in the dark and said that they were confused about the district in which they will ultimately land.
“I don’t know where I am,” said Roe, who has voted in the 5th District for years and has supported Democratic U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, the target of the push by Republicans.
“Not understanding who I’m even actually going to be voting for is incredibly frustrating,” she said. “I can’t, at this point, decide what my focus is going to be on. Am I going to focus on the 5th district or the 4th district? That uncertainty certainly makes it challenging to find a lane.”
Ann Pittman, a teacher in her 40s who lives in the 800 block of East 72nd Street in the same voting precinct, called the redistricting push “unethical” and said it was “lunacy.”
“It’s suspicious that the governor is trying to solidify the conservative vote by splitting up a more diverse vote in the urban area,” she added. “As a result of pushing a specific agenda forward, they made a grave mistake. Now, voting officials, the Secretary of State, they’re going to have to figure this out.”
Pittman lamented the newly formed 5th District, which links a swath of Kansas City to surrounding rural areas out into central Missouri.
“A farmer’s concerns are not going to be the same as my concerns as a teacher who teaches in an urban setting,” she said. “We don’t have (the) same goals and needs, and so to lump us all together in the same district seems unfair to the people.”
Legal challenge and lingering questions
The map faced legal challenges and went before the state’s highest court after the ACLU of Missouri, among other arguments, claimed some voters were simultaneously placed in the 4th and 5th congressional districts. The organization claimed Republicans rushed the process and erred in assigning the neighborhood’s voting precinct to two congressional districts. They claimed that the mistake, among other concerns, made the congressional map illegal.
But the Missouri Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected those claims, ruling that the organization did not offer enough evidence to back up its arguments. A lower court found that there are two separate voting precincts referred to as KC 811, allowing them both to be assigned to different districts, the ruling stated.
The questions surrounding the mysterious voting district illustrated only a small part of Tuesday’s rulings, which effectively upheld the new map as constitutional. But the pair of rulings has still sparked intense confusion about whether the map will be used in the upcoming elections.
Some residents said Wednesday they were still confused about what the ruling meant for their district and expressed concern about how the move would affect their vote.
One resident, Caroline De Filippis, 34, said she was concerned about how politically driven redistricting ignores the will of voters.
“I wish that local leaders weren’t as politically motivated and biased, and that whoever the current administration is trying to sway locally, would just stand their ground,” she said.
“Just be like, ‘Actually, I’m just going to protect my constituents and…my community. They elected for me for a reason, right?” she said.
De Filippis, who has lived in the 7000 block of Charlotte Street in the Tower Homes neighborhood since 2024, said she is worried about how the confusion about KC 811 could discourage or disempower voters who don’t understand their district or polling place.
“We are, unfortunately, in an area right now where trust has just crumbled — trust in institutions and the government and justice,” she said.
Emily Evans, who lives north of De Filippis, also in the 7000 block of Charlotte Street, called the Missouri Supreme Court ruling “disappointing.”
Redistricting, Evans argued, adds a layer of confusion for voters that shouldn’t be there.
She mentioned concern for people who don’t closely follow politics or elections, stating that redistricting plus poor information access could especially hurt voters’ ability to participate meaningfully.
“It is hard to know who’s on the ballot, what their stance is,” Evans said. “A lot of times, outside of just the mailers that I’m getting, it’s difficult to understand any of it.”
“I think for me personally, like I will continue to vote the way that I have,” she said.
