Missouri asks Supreme Court to revive its GOP gerrymander for the fourth time this year, denied again.

…(cont) The second page was from the eighth. That's the one that told me Missouri had already gone ahead and held its primary under the new map — the 7-1 map, the one favoring the party that drew it — before the justice ruled. Then he ruled. He said no. Missouri had to go back to the old map, the 6-2 one, for November. So the primary wasn't defiance of anything; it just came first, and the ruling caught up to it after.

Third page, the ninth: a different group, the ones who'd fought for the map Missouri was trying to get rid of, went to the same court and asked it to make sure the old map stuck. Fourth page, the tenth: the state's own judges were pressing Missouri's secretary of state about how, exactly, he planned to revert — this while there was a contempt hearing on the calendar over whether he'd told local officials to keep using the new lines anyway.

By the time I got my sticker, I had four pages and a headache, and the man at the actual correct window — the one who could actually renew a plate — didn't have anything to hand me at all. He just did his job. It made me think about the corner store down from my house, the one that runs a tab. You ask Sal for credit once, he says come back Friday. You ask again, same answer. Three times, four times, the answer doesn't change, but the asking does something — it wears a little path in the linoleum, right there by the register, same as your shoes wear a path in stairs you take every day. Nobody drew that path on purpose. It's just where the feet went.

On the twenty-third, a third page — sorry, I mean a third ask that month — went up to the same court, different lawyers this time, just wanting the whole thing settled. And Friday, the court settled it: blocked, again. Missouri's governor said he was disappointed. The map on the ballot this November is the same one used the last two elections — nobody's redrawing anything before people vote. That was, by my four photocopies and whatever this last one makes it, the fourth time this year the identical map went up to that court and came back down blocked.

I was almost to my car — it starts fine most days, just not in the cold — when the man in the windbreaker came out from behind the folding table and said, hold on, before you go, can I get you to sign that you received the pages? I signed. Then I asked him the only thing I still didn't know: if the lines on next month's ballot are the same lines from the last two elections, whose map, exactly, is on it?