MO top election official Jay Ashcroft slams scathing audit as ‘political opinions’

Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft on Tuesday attacked Missouri Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick’s allegations – delivered in a blistering audit report – that Ashcroft violated state law by refusing to turn over the cyber security reviews of local election authorities.

“These are political opinions under the guise of an audit report that are being put forth by an agency that doesn’t even understand the issues that they’re talking about,” Ashcroft said during a news conference in Jefferson City.

The dispute between Ashcroft and Fitzpatrick, two Republican statewide officeholders, comes as Ashcroft mounts a hard-right campaign for governor. He faces two GOP challengers in Lt. Gov. Mike Kehoe and state Sen. Bill Eigel, a Weldon Spring Republican.

Ashcroft’s comments came after Fitzpatrick on Monday released a scathing audit report on the Missouri Secretary of State’s Office that alleged the office refused to provide Fitzpatrick with copies of security reviews of local election authorities in violation of state law. The audit was also highly critical of Ashcroft’s decision last year to leave a national system designed to improve the accuracy of voting rolls called the Electronic Information Registration Information Center, or ERIC.

Fitzpatrick did not immediately respond to Ashcroft’s latest comments on Tuesday. On Monday, Fitzpatrick in a statement called it “disappointing the Secretary of State’s Office stood in the way of our efforts to perform a thorough analysis of how the new cyber security reviews have been implemented.”

Ashcroft told reporters he did not provide the cyber security reviews to Fitzpatrick because his office had signed agreements with local election authorities not to disclose information from the reviews. Fitzpatrick, in his audit, cited a state law that the Missouri General Assembly passed in 2022 that, among other provisions, required the Missouri Secretary of State’s Office and local election authorities to receive cybersecurity reviews every two years.

But Ashcroft said the state law, which went into effect in 2022, was not fully in effect during the audit time period. He also said that the state law does not explicitly require his office to provide the security reviews to Fitzpatrick, saying that if Fitzpatrick disagreed, he should have gone to court.

Ashcroft told reporters that he understood why Missourians think “that there’s a deep state when things like this happen.” When asked to clarify whether he was saying Fitzpatrick’s audit was an attack, he alleged that Fitzpatrick did not conduct the audit.

“I don’t know how much the state auditor actually had to do with this audit,” he said. “I think this audit, reasonably we could expect that this was done by bureaucrats in his office.”

While the state auditor often relies on professional staff to conduct audit work, the auditor oversees the office. Fitzpatrick’s chief of staff, Brandon Alexander, previously worked as a director of elections for Ashcroft’s office.

When asked about this connection, Ashcroft said he “would highlight the term former.”

“I would just say that he is no longer here,” Ashcroft said. “We wish him the best of luck where he is.”

Fitzpatrick’s audit also faulted how Ashcroft left ERIC without a proper replacement, saying that it will impede local election authorities from being able to correct inaccurate voter records. In St. Louis County, for example, the audit found that the national system allowed election authorities to remove thousands of deceased voters from their voter rolls.

Ashcroft on Tuesday pushed back, saying ERIC refused to make reforms to its system and painted the decision to leave as a business decision.

“It is a decision that this office did not take lightly. It is a decision that, contrary to what the state auditor says, we did fully plan out and think about,” he said. “We wanted to leave it well, we wanted to make sure that Missouri’s elections continued to be the gold standard of this country.”

Ashcroft has previously elevated conspiracy theories in his role as the state’s top election official, including meeting with right-wing conspiracy theorist and MyPillow founder Mike Lindell in Jefferson City last year.

His criticism of the system, and his decision to leave, came amid former President Donald Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election and a push by some Republicans to move away from the national system.

Ashcroft has alleged that the system had refused to require states to participate in multi-state efforts to address voter fraud and had focused on adding names to voter rolls by requiring solicitations to individuals who had already had the opportunity to register.