Missouri rally on Capitol riot anniversary draws a handful of Republican lawmakers
On the anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, activists claiming without evidence that the 2020 election was fraudulent sought support among some Missouri Republican lawmakers pushing for stricter election laws.
A rally at the state Capitol featuring Doug Frank, an Ohio math teacher with ties to former President Donald Trump and proponent of the ‘Big Lie,’ drew about 60 people and a handful of House Republicans.
Frank had been invited by Lamar Rep. Ann Kelley and a loose network of Missouri activists calling themselves “canvassers.” They are seeking evidence of voter fraud door-to-door in their communities at the behest of Frank and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who has been campaigning for state attorneys general to join a lawsuit to overturn the election. The Supreme Court in 2020 already declined to hear a challenge brought by several AGs, including Missouri’s.
“You need to keep pressuring your leaders to engage with this problem,” Frank told the crowd.
Frank also spoke at an event in Osage County on Tuesday and attended a dinner Kelley helped organize in Jefferson City on Wednesday, the first day of the 2022 legislative session.
Among his claims are that county voter rolls across the country were artificially inflated prior to the election to enable fraudulent votes to be cast, and then cleaned up afterward. These claims have been widely debunked by elections experts and officials in other states.
Trump won Missouri with 57% of the vote in 2020, and Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft has repeatedly affirmed the security of the election in Missouri. No allegations of fraud were made regarding the outcome.
Rally attendee Victoria Howerton, of West Plains, said she still believed fraud was widespread and that “many in Missouri aren’t worried because the vote went my way.”
Among the crowd’s demands, which Howerton said she supports, are a bill to require paper ballots and to restrict voting to Election Day with few exceptions for absentees. According to Ashcroft’s office, the state’s election machines are not connected to the Internet and all already produce paper audit trails.
Most Missouri Republicans including Ashcroft support stricter voting laws and said they want to focus on those proposals while moving on from the 2020 election results. Ashcroft and other top Republicans including Gov. Mike Parson, and House and Senate leaders, did not attend the event.
One of lawmakers’ priorities this session is reinstating a requirement for a photo ID to vote, which the Missouri Supreme Court threw out in 2020. Republican lawmakers, Ashcroft and other elections officials plan to hold a town hall in St. Louis County next weekend to assure the public Missouri’s elections are secure.
Ashcroft and Frank have spoken before, with Frank telling supporters last month that the secretary of state would “take up the cause” if canvassers found evidence of fraudulent votes. Ashcroft told The Star this week he had not made a deal with Frank but would review any claims of problems brought to his office.
Other Republicans have continued to mix election proposals with 2020 challenges. Lawmakers in attendance Thursday included Reps. Brian Seitz of Branson, Mary Elizabeth Coleman of Arnold, Sara Walsh of Ashland and Dan Stacy of Blue Springs, who spoke to the crowd before Frank’s appearance.
“We need citizen involvement,” Stacy said in an interview. He has sponsored a bill to require that poll watchers be allowed to observe all voting and ballot-counting, “At least 60% of the nation feels like there was challenges in the 2020 election. With that kind of mistrust at some level ... the government should address some of those,” he said.
Stacy said “there was certainly fraud” in the 2020 election and that he did not believe Joe Biden won it. An Associated Press review of every potential case of fraud found 475 instances in six disputed states, which would have made no difference in the outcome.