JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — In April 2023, Osage County Clerk Nicci Kammerich agreed to an experiment — she would tally municipal election results by hand, a move urged by residents who argued it would be cheaper, quicker and more secure.
The results, Kammerich wrote after the election, were the opposite.
The vote count finished three hours later than the previous year, it cost more and the results were less reliable, she wrote. The people she hired as election judges, she wrote, said they would quit if hand counting continued.
“After considering all factors of this election and comparing it to other elections that are similar, I fear that if we were to continue hand counting it would cost us more in time, money, losing volunteers and accuracy of votes,” Kammerich wrote.
Kammerich resigned this summer — saying it was due to “threats, harassment, and bullying my staff and I have received since April 2023,” in her resignation letter, the Linn Unterrified Democrat reported.
In this year’s secretary of state race, state Sen. Denny Hoskins, the Republican nominee, wants to mandate hand-counting for all elections. Like the residents of Osage County who urged it on Kammerich, he said in an interview with The Independent that he distrusts counting machines, believes it will make elections cheaper overall and that it should not delay reporting results.
“I know that the left is trying to make hand counting ballots into some big boogie man, but we did that for hundreds of years before we had the electronic election machines,” Hoskins said. “So it’s not something that has never been done.”
The Democratic nominee, state Rep. Barbara Phifer, said she sees no reason to change the current process where most ballots are counted by scanning machines certified for accuracy by state and federal officials.
“It is an attempt to sow distrust and chaos and he just makes up stuff,” Phifer said.
Hoskins and Phifer are vying to replace Jay Ashcroft, who ran in the Republican primary for governor rather than seek a third term as Missouri’s chief elections officer. Carl Herman Freese is the Libertarian candidate and Jerome Bauer is the Green Party nominee.
Hoskins is an accountant from Warrensburg who has been a lawmaker since 2009, when he became a member of the Missouri House. He was elected to the Senate in 2016.
Phifer, from Kirkwood, has been a representative since 2021. She is a retired United Methodist pastor, working as a religious leader for more than 40 years.
Key difference
The biggest issue in the race is Hoskins’ call for hand-counted ballots.
Voting machines have been in use in some locations for nearly 150 years. Like a secret ballot, the machines were part of efforts to improve elections and protect their integrity.
When Missouri became a state, votes were cast out loud on Election Day. Paper ballots were first printed lists, distributed by political parties and colored to reveal each voters’ preference. A plain paper ballot with all candidates’ names was mandated in Missouri by a law passed in 1875.
Vote counting with lever-style machines began in 1892 in some locations in the United States and computerized vote counting was introduced in the 1960s.
Today, Missouri mandates a paper ballot counted by machines certified for accuracy by federal and state officials, including the secretary of state’s office.
County clerks have the option to use hand-counting at any election.
The machines are trustworthy and deliver results in the timely manner demanded by the public, said Cape Girardeau County Clerk Kara Clark Summers, a Republican.
“When there’s so many races and so many things on the ballot, and then you’re trying to literally hand count every ballot and every race and every question on the ballot, it’s too overwhelming,” Summers said. “There’s too much room for human error and also for fraud to take place.”
With 56,000 registered voters, she said, the task of counting ballots could take days, if not weeks, after Election Day. And because the law mandates bipartisan teams of election judges, she said, finding people just to work the polls can be difficult, so finding counters would multiply the difficulty.
“That’s the problem with a lot of these legislators that want to make these changes, they’ve never performed the job,” Summers said.
Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon said her ballot has 29 items for every voter this year, from the presidential race at the top to judicial retention votes and state ballot issues at the end.
In 2020, 91,837 ballots were cast in Boone County. That many ballots with 29 contests on each results in 2.7 million tallies that must be recorded.
“Elections are a human-run process, and anything that we are asking humans to do is going to have an error rate assigned to it,” she said. “And if you ask them to hand count, in this case, upwards of 90,000 ballots with 29 issues on each ballot, it is asking for errors.”
And because the tallies must be accurate, it has to be done at least twice in every precinct for verification, Lennon said.
“I’d probably need three times the number of election judges that I have, because I have to have extra people there to relieve others that have been there all day,” she said. “So, for example, this election, I need about 650 judges, so I’d be closer to 2,000, almost.”
Lennon was deputy director of elections under Secretary of State Jason Kander.
While Hoskins would need to turn to the legislature if he wants to mandate hand counting ballots, Lennon said he could try to force the issue by refusing to certify new tabulators.
“I don’t see anywhere in that law where it requires the secretary of state’s office to certify any machine at all,” Lennon said. “So if they choose not to, then there just won’t be certified machines.”
Hoskins said the estimates of additional workers and time are exaggerated. Taiwan conducts its elections with hand-counted ballots, he said, and voting machines used in Puerto Rico’s June primary didn’t produce accurate results.
Missouri requires 5% of precincts to be counted by hand after an election to verify the results. If Missouri keeps using machines, Hoskins said, that won’t be enough.
“We need to at least double that percentage,” he said.
The only way to get rid of vote tabulating machines is by legislative action. Hoskins said he will not refuse to certify voting machines to force hand counting.
And he will ask the legislature to provide funding to pay for hand counting, he said.
“Most certainly we could help pay for those election costs through the secretary of state’s budget,” he said. “However, if you don’t have the election machines, or you don’t have as many election machines, I think there will actually be a net savings.”
The cost will be huge because the job will be enormous, Phifer said. While Boone County would have to make 2.7 million tallies, St. Louis County would have 24.3 million, she said.
Officials have estimated that “in order to get it done within four hours, which has been one of the proposed laws, they would have had to hire 44,000 people to do it,” Phifer said. “It just gets absurd after a while.”
Low-key contest
The contest between Hoskins and Phifer hasn’t attracted much money, and most of the attention has centered on Hoskins’ ballot-counting proposal. Phifer outraised Hoskins during September, reports filed earlier this month show, but her total for the campaign, $222,670, hasn’t allowed for much advertising.
Using digital messaging, she said she is targeting younger women voters most likely to also be supporting Amendment 3, which would enshrine abortion rights in the Missouri Constitution.
The courts rewrote the ballot language Ashcroft crafted for Amendment 3, and then rewrote his “fair ballot language,” calling it “unfair, inaccurate, insufficient and misleading.”
It is not the job of the secretary of state to impose political views on ballot measure language, she said.
“We have to have an umpire,” she said. “And when you have an umpire, you don’t want somebody who is actually rooting for the Cardinals or actually rooting for the Royals.”
Hoskins, who won an eight-way primary with 24.4% of the vote, has raised $191,565 for his campaign since the start of 2023, and an affiliated committee, Old Drum Conservative PAC, has taken in $223,725. His latest reports show he has only spent $4,592 since the primary, while Phifer has spent $114,000.
Hoskins has been a factional figure in the Senate, a member of the Freedom Caucus and its earlier iteration, the Conservative Caucus, that sought to disrupt legislation pushed by GOP leadership.
He sees the office as a place to set a policy agenda.
Along with hand-counting ballots, Hoskins is promising to follow up on Ashcroft’s efforts to target environmental, social and governance, or ESG, investing. Ashcroft wrote a rule requiring brokers and investment advisers to obtain annual, written consent to recommend an investment, or actually place any client funds in account that “incorporates a social objective or other non financial objective” for a reason “not solely focused on maximizing a financial return.”
The rule was blocked by a federal court in August, and after initially appealing, Ashcroft dropped his challenge to the ruling in a motion filed early this month.
He will try to write rules that survive a court challenge, Hoskins said.
“The shareholders need to understand that before they invest in those companies,” he said. “And so it needs to be fully disclosed and write big bold letters.”
The issues Hoskins is talking about are not big concerns for voters, Phifer said.
“They are this little group in the Freedom Caucus, and they just talk to each other,” she said. “And they think this is what people in Missouri want. But they don’t.”
This story from the Missouri Independent is published on KSDK.com under the Creative Commons license. The Missouri Independent is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization covering state government, politics and policy.