On May 13, Missouri lawmakers passed a proposed constitutional amendment that would gut popular redistricting reforms that voters overwhelmingly approved in 2018. The amendment will appear on the November ballot. If it passes, Missouri would return to its old deadlock- and gerrymandering-prone system of drawing maps.

The amendment also would open the door for Missouri to abandon the use of total population when drawing legislative districts by excluding both children and non-citizens from the population counts used to draw maps. The Brennan Center’s Yurij Rudensky said that such a change would “minimize the power of communities with lots of children,” hitting African-American communities especially hard.

Our explainer outlines how the Missouri amendment would change redistricting in the Show-Me State.

The next round of redistricting got more complicated with the Census Bureau’s announcement in late April that it would be asking Congress to extend the deadlines for the Bureau to deliver the block-level redistricting data that states will need to redraw legislative and congressional maps in 2021.

Under the Bureau’s proposal, the deadline for delivering redistricting data would move from March 31 to July 31, 2021. Although the change is only four months and is necessary to obtain a fair count, it will complicate the redistricting schedules and timelines of virtually every state and require action in many states to adjust statutory or constitutional deadlines. Election deadlines in some states also may be impacted, in some cases significantly.

The Brennan Center has published a memo providing a state by state look at the impact of census delays and the steps states may need to keep redistricting on track. As of June 12, the U.S. House had passed legislation approving the extensions, but legislation is still pending in the Senate.

Researchers at the City University of New York have created a map of the United States that provides a near-real-time look at self-response rates for the 2020 Census all the way down to the census tract level, including comparisons to final self-response rates in 2010. cuny.edu/academics/current-initiatives/cuny-census/

• Republicans in Wisconsin are trying to put in place controversial new rules that would ensure that the Wisconsin Supreme Court rather than a federal court draws the state’s maps if, as expected, the process deadlocks because of divided control of government.
• In Oklahoma, the state supreme court cleared the way for proponents of redistricting reform to begin collecting signatures for a ballot measure that would create an independent redistricting commission.
• A federal district judge gave redistricting reformers additional time to collect the nearly 98,000 signatures needed to place a proposal to create an independent commission on the November ballot. Reform groups had collected roughly 10,000 signatures before stay-at-home orders as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic put a halt to efforts. Under the judge’s order, the groups will now have until August 5 to collect signatures.
• In Arkansas, a federal court ruled that the reform coalition seeking to put a redistricting reform measure on the November ballot did not need to comply with notary and in-person witness requirements when collecting signatures, but rejected a request to be able to collect signatures electronically.
• A federal judge in New York ordered the Trump Administration to pay costs and fees to challengers of the now-blocked census citizenship question, after finding that the Department of Justice failed to turn over hundreds of documents prior to trial.