With filing season in sight, local election officials deal with mounting uncertainty on boundary lines

Posted 9/29/21

HERMANN — With filing season for local government offices on the horizon, election officials such as Gasconade County Clerk Lesa Lietzow are having to grapple with an increasing amount of …

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With filing season in sight, local election officials deal with mounting uncertainty on boundary lines

Posted

HERMANN — With filing season for local government offices on the horizon, election officials such as Gasconade County Clerk Lesa Lietzow are having to grapple with an increasing amount of uncertainty regarding district boundary lines.

From state legislative districts to aldermanic wards to dividing the county in half, the drawing of lines on a map is becoming a pressing issue for Lietzow and her counterparts throughout Missouri. One that grows in significance each day, thanks to a late unveiling of 2020 census numbers.

The numbers of real importance to Lietzow aren’t expected to be announced by the U.S. Census Bureau until late this month. “By the end of September, we’re supposed to know what our townships’ (populations) are,” Lietzow told the Gasconade County Commission earlier this month. “We need our townships’ counts.”

Having those final township numbers will tell county officials where the population loss occurred.  “We know we lost population,” the clerk said. “We don’t know where we lost it from,” she added.

Indeed, the Census Bureau reported that Gasconade County lost about 500 residents in the last 10 years, or a little more than 3 percent of the total population. Like previous population losses, it’s believed by county officials that loss will be most pronounced in the northern portion of the county, including Hermann. If that’s the case, then the boundary line between the Northern District and the Southern District of the county will  need to be pushed farther south to bring the two districts’ populations more in balance.

As it is now, the Northern District is the larger of the two, expanded after the last census count to include Third Creek Township, which lies just west of Owensville.

Filing for the April elections begins in December. For most local government agencies, such as school boards, on the April ballot, boundaries are not a factor. They are, however, for cities. The census should indicate whether a board of aldermen needs to adjust its ward boundaries to represent population shifts in the past 10 years.

More crucial to Lietzow and other clerks who serve as their counties’ chief elections officials are the filings that are scheduled to begin in February for state legislative and U.S. State Representative districts.

At a recent County Clerks’ Association conference in St. Charles, a panel of state legislators said a redrawn map will be proposed by Dec. 23 for public consideration and comment. “That’s what we have to hope for, that these lines get drawn,” Lietzow said.

“They’re still hoping that when filing opens in February, people will know what district it is they’re filing in,” she said. The late census has produced a lot of confusion. “We don’t even know who our state reps will be,” she said.

State House of Representatives districts often undergo significant redesign with each census count. Now, the 61st House District includes essentially the northern halves of Gasconade, Franklin and Osage counties. How closely the redrawn district will look like the current 61st remains to be seen.

“Are we going to have one state rep, or two, or three?” Lietzow asked, illustrating how uncertain the redistricting project can be.

Lietzow will be talking about all of this — and any developments that might occur along the way — when she serves as the guest speaker at the Nov. 1 meeting of the Gasconade County Republican Club. She is being asked to speak on the future of elections. That will lead her into a discussion of several major elections bills that did not pass in this year’s session of the Missouri General Assembly.

Those included a proposal to move school board elections to November, putting a non-patisan election in the midst of the highly partisan federal, state and county elections. If legislative history holds, at least some of the bills will be revived in the 2022 session.

Commissioners are scheduled to meet again at 8:30 a.m. tomorrow (Thursday) at the courthouse.