JEFFERSON CITY — In his nearly two terms as secretary of state, Jay Ashcroft staked out numerous positions popular with Republicans.
Ashcroft, now seeking the GOP nomination for governor, , wrote rules against age-inappropriate library materials, and won the anti-abortion Missouri Right to Life’s endorsement after defending politically charged language for an abortion-rights ballot question.
Now, several Republicans hoping to succeed him in 2025 could take the office even further to the right — and might pivot to issues that have only emerged more recently in conservative politics, such as ensuring noncitizens don’t vote and requiring the hand-counting of paper ballots.
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On the latter issue, state Sen. Denny Hoskins of Warrensburg and fellow candidate Valentina Gomez of ºüÀêÊÓƵ, have been out front in pushing for hand-counting of paper ballots.
Hoskins filed a bill last year that would require hand-counting of ballots. In an interview, he said he had heard from software professionals that machines are vulnerable to hacking.
He has also pointed to recent discrepancies in Puerto Rico, where machines supplied by Dominion Voting failed to accurately count vote totals, the island’s election commission interim president previously said, the Associated Press.
Gomez, who generated wide attention for burning transgender-themed books earlier this year, claimed without evidence that President Joe Biden did not win 81 million votes in the 2020 election.
“Machines can be hacked and manipulated, so I will be getting rid of them, and we will have the most free and fair elections in history through single day in-person voting, paper ballots, with voter ID, no mail-in ballots except for our Military and Disabled,†Gomez said in an email in response to written questions from the Post-Dispatch.
But five other Republican candidates for secretary of state defended the use of machines to count votes. The eighth candidate, House Speaker Dean Plocher of Des Peres, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
One of the candidates, Shane Schoeller, a former state legislator and the current Greene County Clerk, said bipartisan teams tested vote-counting machines ahead of the primary and will test them again afterward.
In addition, hand-counts of randomly chosen precincts and races will take place after the primary election.
State regulations require all three measures to be taken, Schoeller said.
“This is my tenth year serving as a county clerk, and I’ve had ties, and one-vote outcomes, and I have not yet had a contest that’s been overturned when we’ve done the hand-count,†Schoeller said. “So you really need to have both.â€
Missourians cast more than 3 million votes in the 2020 presidential election.
“Hand-counting is only as good as the people who are doing the counting,†said state Sen. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, another contender for secretary of state. “You have to have both systems in place to make sure that people trust the results.â€
Jamie Corley, a former GOP congressional staffer who lives in University City, said she supported “paper ballots tabulated by a machine that’s never connected to the internet.â€
“Hand-counting is a good auditing tool but using that as the sole counting procedure could open up our systems to waste, fraud and abuse,†Corley said.
State Rep. Adam Schwadron, of St. Charles, said “absolutely not†when asked if Missouri needed to shift to hand-counting exclusively.
Schwadron said studies show hand-counting is unreliable and Gillespie County, Texas, this year showed “it is cumbersome, it costs too much money, it’s inaccurate, and it’s a short-sighted move to hand-count ballots.â€
Mike Carter, the Wentzville municipal court judge, called only hand-counting “borderline ridiculous.â€
He said everybody wants election results faster.
People get “antsy†after the polls close, Carter said. Adding hand-counting to it, he said, “that’s just simply gonna be a different world.â€