Missouri GOP candidates fear voting machines. Here’s how they would change elections

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Denny Hoskins, a Republican candidate for Missouri secretary of state, had just started his stump speech to the Greater Kansas City Pachyderm Club when he turned to his distrust of voting machines. A state senator, Hoskins has proposed legislation to require ballots be counted by hand.

Hoskins, who lives in Warrensburg, recalled how the satellite radio in his GMC pickup had malfunctioned in the minutes after a would-be assassin tried to kill former President Donald Trump. He admitted to wondering at that moment whether the country was under a cyber attack.

“It was just a glitch in the software in my truck because an hour later it started working fine,” Hoskins told the luncheon crowd earlier this month. “There … can be all sorts of glitches when we talk about anything electronic and computerized.”

Several Republicans running for secretary of state are promising significant changes to elections and voting in Missouri.

Ahead of the Aug. 6 primary election , they have made baseless fears of migrant voting a centerpiece of their campaigns and played into lingering distrust of elections among conservatives as former President Donald Trump continues to falsely deny he lost the 2020 presidential election.

Hoskins wants to mandate the hand-counting of all ballots – a monumental shift that would stretch election officials in Kansas City and St. Louis to the breaking point. Candidates have also called for mandatory signature verification of absentee ballot envelopes.

Others oppose steps to make voting easier, including expanded voting by mail, even though the Trump campaign now embraces it. The idea of allowing ballot drop boxes in Missouri is verboten.

Local election officials and election experts are highly skeptical of some of the proposals, especially plans to hand count all ballots. The number of workers necessary to count ballots would prove significant. Unofficial results, expected by the public on election night, would likely be pushed into the next day.

“I can tell you that for our jurisdiction here in Jackson County, where we have over 270,000+ active registered voters, the additional work and resources would be more than double,” Sara Zorich, the Democratic director of the Jackson County Election Board, wrote in an email.

Eight Republicans are competing for secretary of state. The large field and a lack of public polling on the race makes discerning a likely winner difficult.

The candidates include Missouri House Speaker Dean Plocher, Rep. Adam Schwadron, Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, former congressional staffer Jamie Corley, Greene County Clerk Shane Schoeller, social media personality Valentina Gomez, municipal judge Mike Carter and Hoskins.

Most candidates are vowing to secure Missouri elections against voting by non-citizens, an exceedingly rare occurrence. But their plans to address the issue are often vague, boiling down to calling for state or federal legislation instead of actions they would take in office.

The aggressive rhetoric reflects a focus on illegal immigration among Missouri Republicans generally as GOP candidates across the country attempt to link Democrats to President Joe Biden’s handling of the southern border. Plocher, for instance, has gone as far as convening a House committee to “assess criminal activities involving illegal immigrants in the state.”

’I am very concerned that the thousands of illegals pouring into the state will attempt to register and displace Missouri citizens’ voter rights,” Plocher said when he launched his campaign. “We must protect the integrity of our elections and only allow those that are legal residents of this state and citizens of this country to participate in Missouri elections.”

GOP election fraud focus

The Missouri secretary of state – like many secretary of state offices across the country – was once thought of as a largely ministerial, even sleepy, job. Politicians sometimes used the position to burnish their reputation on the way to higher office. But the office’s key functions, including managing business records and overseeing elections, didn’t attract much attention.

In the era before term limits, Democrat James Kirkpatrick held the office for 20 years, from 1965 to 1985. In recent decades, the role has served as a stepping stone – former U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, former Gov. Matt Blunt and Jason Kander, who ran for U.S. Senate, all took turns in the office. The current secretary of state, Republican Jay Ashcroft, is running for governor.

But Republicans’ growing focus on elections and the specter of voter fraud over the past decade, and especially since 2020, has raised the profile of secretary of state offices. In Kansas, Republican Kris Kobach pioneered the new model a decade ago and personally defended a proof of citizenship voter registration law that a federal court struck down .

Today, Missouri’s term limits, which forces politicians to try to quickly climb the political ladder, and a conservative electorate likely to elect the GOP primary winner in November, has led to a large field of candidates. Many hopefuls have adopted increasingly aggressive rhetoric and proposals in an attempt to set themselves apart from the competition.

John J. Martin, a law professor at the University of Virginia who researches election law, said 10 years ago he would have been surprised by this level of interest in a secretary of state race. Now, not so much.

“It’s not necessarily that their roles have changed dramatically over the past 10 years, but given all the election denialism that’s been propagated since 2020, I think there’s been a lot more focus – from both sides – on this process of election administration,” Martin said.

Hoskins has offered legislation that would prohibit the use of machines to count ballots. He has also proposed to restrict the use of voting machines to mark ballots to only individuals with disabilities.

Schwadron, who represents St. Charles in the House, on his campaign website voices support for requiring the use of hand-marked paper ballots, which would mean stopping the use of machines to fill out ballots. He has sponsored legislation that would cause voter registrations to expire every six years – a change that would require even active voters to regularly re-register.

And Schwadron introduced the “Missouri Elections Sovereignty Act,” a measure that asserts state authority over state and local elections to “the maximum extent authorized by the Constitution of the United States.”

“Any attempt by the federal government to come in here and tell us how to do it will be met with resistance,” Schwadron told a gathering of Jackson County Republicans this month. “I have a size 15 shoe and I will use it to personally kick them out of this state.”

Hand counting concern

As the candidates barnstorm Missouri, calls to hand-count ballots prompt the most concern among local election officials.

Missouri law allows for hand counting but, practically speaking, most localities use machines that scan paper ballots. Hand counting requires bipartisan teams to look at each ballot when recording votes.

If a ballot contained just one question, hand counting would potentially go smoothly, even in a relatively large jurisdiction, said Eric Fey, president of the Missouri Association of County Clerks and Election Authorities.

The problem is that primary and general election ballots can contain dozens of questions – and every mark on the ballot must be examined by a Republican and Democrat election judge, then recorded. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of ballots and the scale of task becomes massive.

“You would have to find a whole bunch more people to help with hand counting and they have to be in equal numbers of the two major political parties under Missouri law,” Fey said. “So finding enough Democrats in rural Missouri and enough Republicans in the urban areas of Missouri would be nearly impossible, in my opinion.”

Osage County, in central Missouri, tried hand counting in its April 2023 municipal election. The county had used optical scanning machines from Dominion, a voting machine company that’s been the subject of false election conspiracies.

County Clerk Nicci Kammerich detailed the results in a letter to the editor in the local newspaper, the Unterrified Democrat. Even in the largely rural county, some results took an additional two to three hours with hand counting. April elections using optical scanners required about 28 election workers, but she estimated that hand counting going forward would require an additional 44 workers.

Kimmerich wrote that the county would continue using the machines. “Our tabulation machines the county uses for elections are faster, accurate and more efficient to get the job done,” she wrote.

A move to hand counting would also place Missouri well outside the mainstream of American elections. More 75% of U.S. voters in 2020 cast ballots that were counted by optical scan machines, according to data compiled by the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. Less than 1 percent of ballots cast were counted by hand.

Some candidates oppose mandatory hand counting. Carter, the municipal judge, told St. Louis Public Radio in June that while ballots can be hand counted, voters can “also trust the machinery at a very basic level because all it is doing is tabulating the dots that roll through it.”

The push for ever-more aggressive election security measures comes even as some elected Republicans say the state’s elections are already secure. In 2022, Ashcroft said the state was “setting the pace” in the area of election security and confidence.

Rep. Peggy McGaugh, a Republican from rural Carroll County who chairs the House Elections and Elected Officials Committee, said Missouri’s elections are well run.

“I believe that Missourians know that our elections are sound and solid,” said McGaugh, who spent 32 years as the Carroll County clerk.

Non-citizen voting fears

In the Missouri secretary of state’s race, the emphasis on election security has frequently been linked to fears of non-citizen voting.

Amid an influx of migrants, Trump and national Republicans have stoked unsubstantiated concerns that individuals in the United States illegally or seeking asylum will try to cast ballots.

“The woke radicals believe illegal immigrants should be allowed to vote in Missouri elections. Not on my watch. As your next #MOSOS, illegals won’t get to vote, but we will support their imprisonment and deportation,” Mary Elizabeth Coleman, a state senator, wrote in a recent social media post .

Republicans are planning to highlight fears of non-citizen voting for several more months.

Missourians in November will vote on a state constitutional amendment to ban ranked-choice voting. The ballot question will also ask whether voters want to ban non-citizens from voting in the state, a practice that is already illegal.

The provision has been called “ballot candy,” or a way to entice voters as Republicans seize on fears about illegal immigration. Proponents say it will stop Missouri cities from ever allowing limited non-citizen voting in municipal elections, which a handful of localities have done across the country.

“I believe that the push in Missouri is to be proactive, rather than reactive, and make a law, get it in a statute, or at least in the code of state regulations, that Missouri will not allow non-citizens in any election,” McGaugh said.

Election experts flatly say instances of non-citizens voting illegally are extremely rare and are easy to catch. And at a gut level, they say, it doesn’t make sense that non-citizens would risk arrest and deportation from a country where they want to live – all for the chance to cast a single ballot.

“It happens exceedingly rarely and it’s largely because the states and federal government already have really good policies in place,” David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, which seeks to build trust in elections, told reporters in May.

Republicans have drawn attention to the issue in part because concerns about illegal immigration in general are near the top of voters’ minds.

Three-fourths of voters say the situation along the U.S.-Mexico border is a crisis that must be resolved immediately, according to a February poll conducted by Saint Louis University and YouGov. Nearly all Republican voters surveyed agreed it’s a crisis.

John Hancock, a former Missouri Republican Party executive director and chair, said in a recent interview that most of the state’s elections are effectively over in the primaries. Democrats haven’t won a statewide election since 2018, when Nicole Galloway won a full term as state auditor.

Republicans, in turn, increasingly cater to the concerns of primary voters.

“So when you’ve got an issue that polls as strongly as immigration does in GOP primaries,” Hancock said, “it’s a no brainer that that’s going to be an issue that gets a lot of focus.”

The Star’s Kacen Bayless contributed reporting