Top Missouri election official wants ban on helping voters fix absentee ballot mistakes
Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft wants the General Assembly to ban local election workers from helping voters correct mistakes on absentee ballots, a change that could keep some votes from being counted.
The request adds to a growing list of measures advanced by Republicans to alter the state’s election laws, including restoring rules requiring voters to show a photo ID and making it harder to amend the state constitution through ballot measures. Lawmakers failed to pass most proposals earlier this year, but proponents are signaling they will try again in 2022.
The proposals come as GOP legislators indulge lingering conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 presidential election. Missouri Republicans are also keen on curbing Democrats’ success at passing progressive policies through statewide votes. Medicaid expansion, medical marijuana and minimum wage increases have all been approved by voters in recent years.
“We would like to see legislation that does not allow for curing of absentee ballots,” Deputy Secretary of State Trish Vincent told the House Elections Committee last week, ‘curing’ being a common term for fixing errors.
In response to the pandemic, the Republican-controlled General Assembly temporarily made all voters eligible to cast a ballot by mail, but required most to have their ballot notarized. Previously, voters had to provide an excuse to vote absentee.
Voters flocked to mail voting. More than 28% of Missouri voters cast ballots by mail in November, up from 8 percent in 2018, according to federal statistics.
The House in March passed a bill that would again allow absentee voting without an excuse for three weeks before an election, but voters would have to show photo ID. The Missouri Supreme Court last year struck down much of the state’s photo ID law but Republicans, including Ashcroft, believe it can be restored in a way courts will accept.
The Senate, bogged down in fights over Medicaid funding, guns and other issues, didn’t debate the proposal but could revive it next year.
“I don’t think we’re going to go back to the mail-in like we did during COVID,” said Rep. Dan Shaul, an Imperial Republican who chairs the House Elections Committee.
Permanent no-excuse absentee voting could pave the way to a dramatic expansion of absentee ballots cast — and by extension increase the number of absentee ballots with problems. Missouri election authorities rejected 5,437 mail ballots — 0.6% of the total number of mail ballots returned — in the 2020 election. The rate was lower than the overall U.S. rate of 0.8%.
BEHIND THE STORY
MOREThe Bigger Picture: Missouri
The 2020 presidential election sparked baseless Republican accusations that President Joe Biden won because of voter fraud. Since then, at least 18 GOP-controlled state legislatures have enacted as many as 30 laws tightening ballot access.
Missouri’s history of limiting where and how people vote predates the 2020 campaign.
In 2016, voters approved a ballot measure requiring a state-issued voter ID at the polls. Those without one could still vote, but had to sign an affidavit putting them at risk of perjury. The law was struck down four years later by the Missouri Supreme Court. A new version this year stalled in the Senate. Lawmakers said they will try again in 2022.
Until the pandemic, Missouri offered some of the nation’s most limited and confusing options for voting. Absentee voting by mail was permitted only with one of a few state-sanctioned excuses. Prompted by the coronavirus, Gov. Mike Parson signed temporary legislation allowing all Missourians to vote by mail in 2020. But, even then, most were required to have their mail-in envelopes notarized. The law expired at the end of 2020.
Missouri lawmakers and officials plan to press for more measures to limit the vote. Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft has called for a ban on “curing” ballots — the practice of local election officials helping voters correct ballot errors. Republicans plan to push for bills that target the initiative petition process for getting measures on the statewide ballot. Read more by clicking the arrow in the upper right.
The Bigger Picture: Kansas
Shortly after the 2020 elections, Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab said balloting in the state had been “free and fair,” with strong policies in place to ensure a legitimate outcome.
Despite Schwab’s report, Kansas lawmakers joined their colleagues in GOP-controlled statehouses across the country in passing measures making it more difficult for many residents to vote, citing the need to guard against fraud.
One of the new laws impacts the elderly and disabled who have difficulty getting to the polls on their own., making it a misdemeanor for anyone to return more than ten advance ballots to election authorities. Another bars the governor and the courts from altering election laws — a measure aimed at preventing extension of deadlines or poll hours because of a public emergency like a pandemic. It is now a felony in Kansas “to give the appearance of being an election official.”
Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly vetoed the measures, but the legislature’s GOP supermajority overrode her rejections.
Voting rights groups are challenging the laws in state and federal court.
Ashcroft has said previously the best way to vote is in-person on Election Day, a view Vincent reiterated to the committee. She called the absentee voting process fairly simple and said the state isn’t putting up obstacles.
“If the voter forgets to sign it, why is it OK for an election authority to call them and say you didn’t sign this, do you want to come and sign it?” Vincent said. “Do they get to get their ballot out of the tabulator and say, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to vote that way, can I change it?’”
Some lawmakers say the General Assembly should instead set rules allowing mistakes to be fixed.
“Why wouldn’t the state establish a procedure for voters to cure their votes … we say we want people to be able to vote and for their votes to matter and to be counted,” said Rep. Joe Adams, a University City Democrat.
Different approaches to ‘curing’
As of September 2020, at least 18 states required election authorities to try to reach voters to correct signature problems on ballot envelopes, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In Kansas, county election officers are required to attempt to contact voters who submit ballots with no signature or ballots where the signature doesn’t match the one on file.
The Kansas City Election Board didn’t respond to questions Wednesday. Directors for the Jackson County County Election Board said they don’t cure ballots.
“Once the voter drops that in the mailbox or walks it into our office, it’s deemed cast,” said Tammy Brown, the board’s Republican director.
Brown described the policy as a fairness issue. “While one voter you may have an email address for, there may be 50 others you can’t get a hold of because we have no contact information for them,” she said.
At least some election officials attempt to cure ballots. KOMU, a mid-Missouri TV station, reported in October 2020 that clerks in both Boone County, home of Columbia, and Cole County, home of Jefferson City, attempted to help voters with ballot problems.
“We make multiple attempts. We try on an ongoing basis to go through and any of the ones that we’ve received that still need follow-up. We will continue to do so all the way until Election Day,” Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon told the station.
Vincent said the secretary of state’s office also wants to prohibit groups that register voters from paying people to solicit voters registration applications. She said organizations create “great confusion” by telling people to register to vote when they’re already registered.
The ban on paid solicitation is part of the bill that passed the House. The legislation also prohibits changes to election laws less than half a year before a presidential election — a direct response to litigation in Pennsylvania and other states in the lead-up to the 2020 election.
But perhaps Vincent’s biggest request centers on making Missouri’s initiative petition process more restrictive. She urged lawmakers to raise the threshold for passage of state constitutional amendments in statewide elections.
Amendments currently require a simple majority but at least one bill considered by lawmakers this spring would require two-thirds support.
The current initiative petition process also requires signatures from 8 percent of registered voters from any six of the state’s congressional districts to get questions on the ballot. Lawmakers have weighed requiring 10 percent of registered voters in all eight of the state’s congressional districts to sign petitions.
“When we have a low turnout and 14% of the electorate changes what’s in the constitution, it’s pretty sad,” Vincent said.
The initiative petition process has allowed liberals to approve policies popular with voters that wouldn’t likely pass the conservative legislature. In addition to Medicaid expansion and medical marijuana, voters also rejected a “Right to Work” law opposed by unions.
“We feel these are blatant attempts to silence the voices of Missouri voters because many legislators were upset by certain initiatives that were introduced and passed by the vote of the people in last year’s election and in the past,” said Jennifer Bernstein, advocacy manager at the National Council of Jewish Women St. Louis.
Voters have sometimes also backed GOP-led proposals. Voters approved an amendment this November repealing changes to the state’s redistricting process designed to thwart gerrymandering that Republicans argued were a power grab by Democrats.
Hearing featured conspiracies
Vincent’s testimony to the House Elections Committee came toward the end of an hours-long hearing that featured baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election.
Rep. Ann Kelley, a Lamar Republican, recounted her experience at a symposium in South Dakota organized by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder who has pushed widely debunked allegations of widespread fraud. And David Stevens, who said he is a former military intelligence analyst, advanced the discredited theory that an algorithm was used to flip votes across the country.
“I am convinced that we — Missouri and the United States of America — suffered the greatest cyberattack in the history of the world that was ordered and orchestrated by the Chinese Communist Party,” Stevens said.
Greene County Clerk Shane Schoeller emphasized that Missouri certifies election results based on paper ballots and takes rigorous steps to keep data secure, including encrypted memory sticks and testing equipment with bipartisan teams.
“There are a number of opportunities throughout the entire certification process for anything that does not appear to be correct to be resolved,” Schoeller said.
The Star’s Jeanne Kuang contributed reporting
This story was originally published September 1, 2021 at 3:02 PM.
