Missouri's chief election official says he's ready to roll out the welcome mat for federal agents digging into voter fraud, just as the Department of Homeland Security launches a coordinated criminal surge across nine states ahead of the November midterms. Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, says his office lacks the tools state investigators would normally use, and that federal partners can fill the gap.
Hoskins told Spectrum News he is ready to assist federal agencies with investigations to secure Missouri elections and prosecute fraudulent activity, adding that federal agencies have tools and resources available to them that Missouri officials do not. He said eradicating any possible threat to Missouri elections is his priority, and that the Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security remain welcome partners. Hoskins ran on an election integrity platform in 2024, and the article, written by Gregg Palermo, notes he did not address whether credible fraud allegations warranted the new federal surge, whether his office knew about it before it launched, or whether his office requested it.
Why Missouri Needs Outside Help
The gap Hoskins is describing traces back to August 2025, when his office lost its long-standing administrative subpoena power after a legislative bill to reinstate it was filibustered, according to the Missouri Secretary of State's office. That left state election officials dependent on federal, state, and local law enforcement to actually conduct fraud investigations, rather than compelling records themselves. Hoskins reported that his office has removed more than 280,000 ineligible voters from Missouri's rolls since 2024, per Spectrum News.
His office has also leaned on data-sharing rather than subpoenas to screen the rolls. In June 2026, Hoskins reported that his office cross-referenced state voter rolls against the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, identifying roughly 1,000 registered Missouri voters whose U.S. citizenship status could not be confirmed, the Secretary of State's office said. That same month, Hoskins transferred driver's license numbers and birth years of Missouri voters to the U.S. Department of Justice without a court order, according to Mark Maxwell — a move that walked back a public pledge Hoskins made in February 2026 that no private voter data would be shared with federal agencies without judicial compulsion.
A Nine-State Federal Sweep
The Missouri overture comes as Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, launches a coordinated criminal voter fraud surge initiative meant to pursue investigative leads, conduct field interviews, and support timely prosecutorial review, per CNN guidance cited in the Spectrum News report. According to Quartz, the operation targets nine states — Missouri, Washington, Wisconsin, Georgia, California, Pennsylvania, Nevada, New York, and Connecticut — and is scheduled to run from early September through mid-October, directly ahead of the midterms. Traditional Justice Department policy has historically advised federal law enforcement against taking overt public investigative steps close to elections, to avoid voter deterrence or political entanglement, but DHS operates under separate guidelines and omitted election proximity restrictions from its surge directive, Quartz reports. Federal records released this month also show ICE plans to allocate up to $5 million toward building a federal voter database that cross-references state voter roll records against federal immigration and law enforcement databases, according to a post from Wired.
Not every state's top election official is on board. Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs called the DHS investigation a waste of taxpayer dollars and an attempt to cause confusion ahead of the midterms, according to FOX 13 Seattle. That reaction stands in sharp contrast to Hoskins' welcome for the same federal push into Missouri.
A Reversal From the Ashcroft Era
Hoskins' stance also marks a shift from his predecessor. Jay Ashcroft, a Republican who served as Missouri Secretary of State in 2022 and 2024, criticized Justice Department efforts to monitor civil rights compliance at polling places during the Biden administration in both of those years, per Spectrum News. In November 2024, a federal judge rejected Ashcroft's legal bid to block polling-place monitors from observing sites in St. Louis, a ruling detailed by KSDK.
The legal and constitutional backdrop for all of this citizenship-verification activity is Amendment 7, which Missouri voters approved with 68.4% support in November 2024. The amendment explicitly mandated that only U.S. citizens can vote in state elections while also banning ranked-choice voting, according to a summary of the measure. Missouri has also looked beyond its own borders for verification help: in November 2025, the state entered a bilateral agreement with Kansas to share and cross-reference voter registration data covering roughly 6 million residents, aimed at catching duplicate registrations across the state line, per the Kansas Reflector.
The DHS surge lands in Missouri after a series of aggressive moves from Hoskins' office this year, including a fight over library funding tied to a Columbia rainbow story time and a Cole County judge's ruling that blocked voters from vetoing the GOP's new map. It also follows a separate federal case last week in which a Ventura green card holder was charged with voter fraud, with feds signaling more charges were coming. Hoskins has not said whether his office knew about or requested the new federal surge before it was announced, and he has not addressed whether credible fraud allegations in Missouri specifically warranted it.
