In the weeks before Missouri's November congressional elections, a cascade of conflicting court rulings has left the state's district boundaries unresolved — a condition that touches something fundamental about democratic legitimacy: the rules of a contest should be settled before the contest begins. Candidates, voters, and election administrators find themselves navigating an electoral landscape whose very geography remains in dispute. The courts, wrestling with genuine disagreements over redistricting principles, have produced not clarity but compounding uncertainty, and the window for resol