KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A year after the attack on the U.S. Capitol, denial and conspiratorial thinking about the 2020 presidential election persists in Missouri, fostered by Republican officials and fringe characters who peddle falsehoods embraced by former President Donald Trump.
The arrival of an Ohio math teacher in Missouri this week illustrates how the obsession with 2020 continues to simmer under the surface in the state, only to occasionally boil over into the open.
Douglas Frank gained fame among die-hard Trump supporters for advancing widely debunked theories claiming to show the election was stolen from Trump. Frank, who has worked with My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, falsely claims President Joe Biden's administration is "illegitimate" and has previously delivered a presentation at a Trump rally laying out his case.
On the eve of Jan. 6, Frank is in central Missouri to encourage those who have bought into the "big lie." He spoke Tuesday evening in Osage County and will attend a dinner Wednesday night before headlining a Thursday rally at the Missouri Capitol.
Trump easily won Missouri in 2020, earning nearly 57% of the vote. No allegations of fraud marred the outcome. Still, the onslaught of baseless claims nationally about the presidential race has damaged confidence in the electoral system among some Missouri conservatives.
Frank's appearance at the Jan. 6 rally, billed as "Secure MO's Elections," has been promoted by both Frank and Rep. Ann Kelley, a Lamar Republican who attended a "cyber symposium" hosted by Lindell. A poster for the event promises that legislators "will hear our voices for election reform."
Behind Frank's Missouri visit appears to be a loose, murky network of activists and others bent on searching for election fraud at Lindell's behest. The Osage County talk was sponsored by a group called the Missouri Canvassers, which an organizer said was one of many holding the state capitol event.
Lindell is backing efforts around the country to encourage supporters to go door-to-door in search of "phantom voters." These are the names of individuals who move or die and are often not immediately cleared from voter rolls. Their presence on the rolls isn't necessarily an indication of fraud.
The 2020 election was the most secure, transparent and verified in American history, said David Becker, director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. It also generated more litigation than any other, he said, with the Trump campaign unable to support any of its claims.
"Now we sit here, well over 400 days past the election, and the losing candidate and his supporters still have been unable to present any evidence of any problems or fraud that could have affected the outcome of the election," Becker said.
Lindell's canvassers
The Missouri "canvassers" don't appear to have a single website or mainstream social media presence, making it difficult to assess the size of the network. But videos posted online include instructions on how to talk to residents and updates on their progress. A Dec. 28 video says about 40 teams are set to canvass on Saturday.
"It's a mixture of people honestly. Just a mixture of citizens that are wanting legislators to take a closer look at election reform, making sure that our elections are as safe and secure as possible," Kelley said of those organizing Frank's visit
A voicemail left with an individual promoting Frank's visit online wasn't immediately returned. A message sent to an email address for Frank wasn't answered.
Linda Rantz of Osage County, an organizer, said about 185 people have signed up to support canvassing efforts in 14 counties.
Their goals, she said, are threefold: get Missouri to join Lindell's attempt to have the election decertified by the Supreme Court, win passage of unspecified state election reforms and launch a state-level review of the 2020 results. The Supreme Court has already refused to hear a challenge brought by several state attorneys general, including Missouri's.
Rantz hesitated to call the desired review of results an "audit" and said she understood it was unlikely to happen.
"We used to call it a forensic audit, whatever it is that needs to be done to prove something," she said.
For her part, Kelley said bringing Frank to Missouri "has nothing to do with one specific election at all."
"It's just making sure that if we do have issues, or vulnerabilities within our elections that we fix those and just making sure that our election process is just as safe and secure as possible, and that's the whole point," Kelley said.
Lindell is very focused on 2020, however. His current tagline, "Fix 2020 First," reflects his looking-back message.
"Don't be confused. Making suggestions for fixing future elections is not fixing 2020," Frank said in a social media post last month.
At a Linn wedding venue outside a bed-and-breakfast Tuesday night, the gregarious Frank worked a crowd of two dozen with encouraging words about their efforts to "save the country."
"You guys are the heroes," he said. "My job is to support you."
He gave a presentation outlining his thesis that voter rolls across the country were artificially inflated prior to the 2020 election. This was done, he said, with the names of voters who died or moved and hadn't yet been removed from the rolls, or by malicious actors using census data. He also claimed the number of votes cast in Missouri did not match a number that Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft later gave him, and said to explain the discrepancy he wanted the names of every Missouri resident who cast a ballot.
Frank's claims have been debunked by elections officials in other states. While other Republicans have alleged illegitimate results in a half-dozen swing states, Frank goes much farther. He asserts that fraud was rampant across the United States.
Republican election officials have said Missouri's elections were secure, but Rantz thinks otherwise.
"I don't believe it, personally," she said. "We don't believe that our county clerks are corrupt, we don't believe there's corruption at that level. It's more of what Dr. Frank says, that they maybe don't understand."
'Take up the cause'
Individuals associated with the canvassers effort in Missouri were able to secure a one-hour meeting with Secretary of State Ashcroft and other officials in his office. According to a video recap of the meeting posted by an online account associated with the canvassers, they delivered what they said were evidence of more than 100 "phantom voters."
On Dec. 1, Frank posted online to congratulate "our Missouri team of supermoms and canvassers."
"I'd negotiated a deal with their Secretary of State, where he agreed to take up the cause if we brought him 100 phantom voters," Frank wrote. "I'd promised him 100 phantom voters, and the team delivered more."
In an interview, Ashcroft said no "special deal" existed with Frank. He said that his office will check out claims of problems with Missouri's elections when people present evidence. His office will verify the information to the extent possible and will report its findings to the legislature, he said.
Ashcroft said he didn't receive information directly from Frank, but that "all sorts of individuals" have brought to the office reasons they think there are problems.
"We really take an all-comers approach. Whoever sends us information, we look. I think that's my job," Ashcroft said.
Ashcroft has said states, such as Pennsylvania, didn't follow their election laws in 2020. But he has also said there wasn't widespread or systematic fraud that would call into question the results of the election.
But some Missouri Republicans have openly courted election denialists — most prominently candidates for U.S. Senate.
Former Gov. Eric Greitens, who resigned amid scandal, heavily promoted a Republican-led election review in Arizona. Even after it failed to turn up fraud, he still called on Arizona to overturn its results — something that isn't possible.
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt supported a lawsuit seeking to overturn the election. St. Louis businessman Mark McCloskey has said that "there is no question that Donald Trump won the legitimate vote." Reps. Billy Long and Vicky Hartzler both supported efforts to overturn the election by supporting objections to the counting of electoral college votes.
Sen. Josh Hawley was one of the most vocal objectors and raised his fist to a crowd outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 before the building was breached. He faced calls to resign in the wake of the riot.
'Confident' in election system
At the state level, some GOP legislators appear ready to distance themselves from the 2020 election.
Ashcroft said he didn't have plans to attend the Jan. 6 rally. Gov. Mike Parson, Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe, Schmitt and Treasurer Scott Fitzpatrick also don't plan to attend, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
"I don't think there's a fixation in the legislature on the 2020 election results at all," said Rep. Jim Murphy, a St. Louis Republican. "I think we're all past that and we're pretty confident in our system."
Murphy is holding a town hall in St. Louis County this month for constituents to hear from local elections officials in the hopes of addressing what he called conspiracy theories and to "assure them that we understand their concerns but in Missouri we have a relatively safe and secure voting apparatus that protects our votes."
House Minority Leader Crystal Quade, a Springfield Democrat, said she believes her Republican counterparts "are starting to move on at least in the legislature."
"I have no doubt it will come up in discussion," she said of Lindell's claims, but "I really don't think it's going to play a role at all" during the legislative session.
Still, others have relied on challenges to mail-in votes in other states in 2020 to point to voting rules they want to tighten in Missouri.
"Our election in Missouri was held very well and I feel very confident in the results that were in the 2020 election in Missouri," said Rep. Dan Shaul, an Imperial Republican who chairs the House Elections and Elected Officials Committee.
He said legislators identified a lot of "smaller fixes" to make based on issues that arose in other parts of the country. As the General Assembly convenes this week, Republican lawmakers remain focused on the stricter election rules they have pursued before, including proposals to allow Ashcroft's office to audit local voter rolls and to reinstate the state's photo voter ID requirement.
The photo ID rule was struck down by the Missouri Supreme Court in 2020 over confusing language that would have required voters without a photo ID to sign an affidavit before casting a ballot attesting they did not have a valid form of identification. Bills proposed in the House would remove the affidavit language entirely, allowing those without a photo ID only to cast a provisional ballot.
Kelley, the Lamar Republican, has proposed requiring paper ballots, prohibiting mail-in voting and instituting an "Election Integrity Committee" that would audit election results at random. Asked whether she hoped the Frank visit would generate more legislative support for challenges of 2020, she said "Missouri could take a stand."
"It is possible that we could decertify the election based upon these other states that have had fraud in their elections," she said, echoing comments by Republicans who contend, baselessly, that Biden's victory can somehow be voided.
"But like I said, I'm one person," Kelley said. "It takes way more people to make decisions up here in Jefferson City."
