Analysis: The problem with Missouri congressional maps
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It's really hard to find a comprehensive map of Missouri's new congressional districts.
The big picture: The midterm primaries are on Tuesday, but after a messy redistricting process, voters (myself included) have to dig to figure out where the boundaries fall.
- The confusion could affect the outcome, with voter education and participation playing an outsized role in elections with historically low turnouts.
I searched the places I figured a voter would look — the state, the local election board, Ballotpedia, even Wikipedia — and found that map tools provided across platforms are often seriously lacking in function and detail.
What worked: I found street-level maps at the National Redistricting Foundation, the Gerrymandering Project and, surprisingly, one candidate's website.
- The ballot lookup tool on Ballotpedia isn't a map, but it only requires a street address to find your district.
What didn't work: Missouri's Redistricting Office, part of the Office of Administration, lists map resources, but the PDFs provided show only a zoomed-out shape of the districts without much additional information.
- Public information officer Shayne Martin tells Axios the Office of Administration provides downloadable granular data (which comes as folders full of code), but its visual maps aren't intended for detailed locating.
- He pointed to the Secretary of State website where residents look up their ballot info — after first figuring out they need to click on "ShowMO Votes" and then entering part of their Social Security number.
The Kansas City Election Board's congressional map, which is a low-resolution image subdivided by wards, cannot be resized.
- The board did not respond to my request for comment.
- The Jackson County Election Board's maps are more detailed, but they focus on the eastern part of the county and aren't interactive.
Ballotpedia does have some street-level interactive maps, but you have to find the right page and scroll far enough to find them — often past old info.
What they're saying: Ballotpedia's director of content, Josh Altic, tells Axios that a lack of detailed maps comes down to timing.
- "For a map enacted only in September and now facing a referendum, the polished public tools that translate those lines down to the street level are still catching up, and we're actively expanding where that detail appears," Altic says.
The bottom line: Finding a detailed map of the new boundaries that operate in Kansas City like streets is way harder than it should be.