5 Missouri voters sue Hoskins, ask for $80 million in damages over referendum signatures

COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)

Missouri voters are asking a Cole County judge to approve a class-action lawsuit against Secretary of State Denny Hoskins over how he handled signatures for the referendum to get the 2025 gerrymandered congressional map on the November ballot.

The lawsuit asks for $500 for each person who signed the referendum, had their signature verified by a county clerk, and remains a Missouri resident, according to court documents filed Friday. About 162,000 people fall into the parameters, and the total payout is about $80 million.

The Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the 2022 map will be used for the November election, and after threatening to hold Hoskins in contempt for saying otherwise, Hoskins has also instructed election officials to use the old map.

In December 2025, the group People Not Politicians submitted over 300,000 signatures for its referendum on the "Missouri FIRST" map, but Hoskins threw out over 100,000 signatures that were collected before the secretary gave the OK to circulate the referendum.

Three of the voters in the lawsuit, Fernando Bermudez, Joseph Welling and John Payne, are from St. Louis. The other two, Gregory Fletcher and Cara Mengwasser, are from St. Louis County.

All five plaintiffs claim Hoskins mishandled the signatures because he refused to certify the referendum in August and stalled court proceedings to delay putting the referendum on the ballot despite it having enough valid signatures.

Hoskins waited until the very last day to issue a certificate of insufficiency for the referendum, saying it was unconstitutional to hold a referendum on a congressional map, and he refused to say whether People Not Politicians collected enough valid signatures.

"...Plaintiffs have all been sufficiently injured by Hoskins's illegal and contumacious actions to deny them this right to entitle plaintiffs (and the members of the class described below) to recover statutory damages under Section 28.200," court documents say.

The voters ask Cole County Judge Cotton Walker to approve the case as a class action lawsuit, which needs to happen before it can proceed.