Nick La Strada, who ran Missouri's Office of Election Integrity from January 2025 to May 2026, plans to file a whistleblower lawsuit alleging he was fired after reporting illegal and unethical conduct inside the Secretary of State's office. His lawyers say the allegations include a plan to fabricate evidence in a federal hearing and a decision to overturn a certified municipal election result.
According to The Kansas City Star, La Strada's attorneys — from the firms Baldwin and Vernon and Popham Law Firm — are holding a press conference at 10 a.m. Monday to detail the claims. La Strada himself won't be there; he's currently stationed as an election observer in Bosnia and Herzegovina. An announcement for the news conference said La Strada was fired for whistleblowing on illegal and unethical conduct within the Secretary of State's office, though the specifics of how that conduct allegedly unfolded have not yet been laid out publicly.
Anne Marie Moy, a spokesperson for Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, told the Star that the office would not comment on pending litigation involving what she characterized as a personnel issue. That's the only response from Hoskins' side so far, leaving La Strada's allegations — including the fabricated-evidence claim and the overturned municipal election result — unaddressed by the office at the center of them.
From County Clerk to State Appointee
From County Clerk to State Appointee La Strada spent 14 years as Pettis County Clerk before Hoskins tapped him to lead the Office of Election Integrity. The Sedalia Democrat reported the position carried an annual salary of $125,000. In January 2025, Hoskins said La Strada's expertise would be instrumental to upholding election integrity, and days later, on January 7, 2025, he said La Strada's experience in election administration made him the ideal choice for the director job.
Under La Strada's watch, the office audited Missouri's voter rolls to ensure they were accurate and free of outdated entries, work Hoskins framed at the time by saying Missourians deserve elections that are secure, transparent, and reflective of their will. By June 2026, Hoskins reported the administration had removed more than 280,000 ineligible voters from the rolls since 2024, while roughly 1,000 voters had citizenship status that could not be confirmed, according to the same reporting.
An Office Stripped of Subpoena Power
The election integrity unit operated under a significant constraint for most of La Strada's tenure: it lost its administrative subpoena authority in August 2025 after a renewal bill was filibustered in the General Assembly, forcing investigators to lean on outside law enforcement agencies for fraud cases, Hoodline previously reported on the subpoena fight. Lawmakers tried to restore that authority in March 2026, when the Missouri House passed a bill granting the Secretary of State subpoena power for election fraud investigations, though the measure sparked debate over executive overreach and potential data misuse, according to KCUR.
That reliance on federal tools created friction of its own. Missouri clerks objected to errors in the federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database, prompting corrections by the Department of Homeland Security, as detailed by Techdirt. The use of federal citizenship databases for voter-roll purges was another issue in the broader debate over election administration.
Separately, KSDK News reported in June 2026 that Hoskins transmitted private driver's license numbers and birth years of Missouri voters to the U.S. Department of Justice without a court order — a move that departed from earlier public commitments he had made to lawmakers in February 2026. The citizenship-verification push itself traces back to Constitutional Amendment 7, which Missouri voters approved in November 2024 to require that only U.S. citizens register and vote in the state's elections.
A Contempt Finding Days Before the Lawsuit
The whistleblower announcement lands just days after the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously found Hoskins in contempt over his handling of the state's congressional map fight. Republican lawmakers had carved Kansas City into three congressional districts in 2025, and a federal court in St. Louis later ruled the state could use no map but that gerrymandered 2025 version. A referendum paused implementation of the 2025 map pending a statewide vote, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to overturn the Missouri Supreme Court's ruling in the matter, though it separately paused the federal court's decision.
Hoskins ordered county clerks and election officials to obey the federal court ruling in the meantime, prompting the Missouri Supreme Court to hold him in contempt for issuing that guidance, according to Democracy Docket. The court did not ultimately punish him, however, because he later instructed election officials to use the 2022 map instead, and the court ultimately ruled the state must use that 2022 congressional map in 2026. The case continued into September 2026.
Hoodline previously covered the redistricting dispute when a Cole County judge upheld Kehoe's map push in February 2026. Whether that broader legal turbulence connects directly to the specific misconduct La Strada plans to allege remains to be seen once his lawyers detail the lawsuit Monday.
