ST. LOUIS – A candidate for the top election official position in Missouri wants to mandate hand-counted ballots.
FOX 2’s partners at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that State Senator Denny Hoskins of Warrensburg filed a bill for the 2024 legislative session to do so.
A 2022 law made paper ballots the official ballots of the state but still allowed them to be fed into a machine to be counted. The Hoskins proposal would repeal that law, which could result in an election taking weeks or months to determine.
He says, “As long as we have the manpower to do it, there will not be issues.”
Hoskins is one of six GOP candidates running for Missouri Secretary of State. One of his competitors, State Representative Adam Schwadron of St. Charles, says there are concerns about election security, but hand-counting ballots would be problematic in larger counties
