The Supreme Court on Friday again blocked Missouri from using its Trump-backed 2025 House map for November, locking in the state's 2022 congressional lines while absentee and overseas voting are already underway.

In an unsigned per curiam stay in People Not Politicians v. Onder (26A388), the justices halted Eighth Circuit and Eastern District orders that would have forced the 2025 map into the live election. The Court said the Missouri Supreme Court has held the 2025 map is not valid state law until voters approve it in a referendum, and that switching maps mid-election would create "electoral chaos." Ballots using the 2022 map have already been printed and mailed, the order noted. PBS NewsHour, the Missouri Independent, and the Washington Examiner all treated Friday's third block as leaving 2022/2024 districts in place for the midterms after earlier Sept. 8 and Sept. 10 interventions in the same fight.

Republicans had sought the redraw to improve House odds by erasing a Democratic-held seat; Democrats and citizen-petition backers argued the referendum process must run first under the Missouri Constitution as read by the state high court. Absentee ballots printed under the old lines make any further emergency scramble remote but still watched by election lawyers tracking Purcell-principle timing fights in other states this cycle. County clerks said they will keep processing absentees under the 2022 lines unless a later court order says otherwise, which Friday's stay makes unlikely before November.

Accounts agree prior districts stand for November after the third Supreme Court intervention. They diverge on partisan seat math versus Purcell-timing chaos as the main lesson of the order.