Austin Huguelet | Springfield News-Leader

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Missouri’s local elections officials say they need help from the legislature to keep voting safe amid the coronavirus outbreak.

Greene County’s Shane Schoeller said Friday that he and other county clerks want several things from lawmakers, starting with a change letting everyone cast absentee ballots in an emergency.

Normally, only people who have one of six specific excuses, like illness or travel away from home on election day, can mail in or drop off a ballot early.

Schoeller said that's not enough in a pandemic, when everyone should be avoiding crowded areas like polling places.

“In a time period like this, we need something to cover everyone,” Schoeller said.

Nathan Papes/Springfield News-Leader

Schoeller, who sits on the board of the Missouri Association of County Clerks and Election Authorities, said his group also wants some other tweaks to prepare for mostly absentee elections.

For one, they want the state to let voters request absentee ballots online so they don’t have to call or visit offices as they do now.

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They also want to be able to set up drop-off boxes outside their offices so people can turn in ballots without going into an office or using the mail, which can be delayed.

Schoeller said clerks in more populous areas, like Springfield, also want the authority to set up special “vote centers” with more space than the usual polling place to accommodate social distancing.

The centers would be open to all voters in a county or other jurisdiction regardless of where they live, unlike the usual polling places.

It’s not clear when the changes would be considered. Lawmakers are not in session this week and when they return, their top priorities will be approving emergency spending to fight the coronavirus and passing the state budget.

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It’s also unclear whether the changes have the support of Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, the state’s top elections official. In a livestreamed interview with The Missouri Times, Ashcroft was skeptical the state could actually pull off an election conducted entirely with mail-in ballots at this point.

"That's not something that can be turned on quickly or something that every county is ready to do," Ashcroft said.

Some have also pushed for more aggressive moves.

Former Secretary of State Jason Kander, a Democrat, suggested recently that Ashcroft could solve the whole problem without the legislature.

He could rule the pandemic a valid excuse to vote absentee without the legislature’s approval and “dare the courts to tell them they’re wrong,” Kander said on Twitter.

But Ashcroft disagreed, saying in a recent interview with the News-Leader that he did not have that power.

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Democrats and the clerks association have also pushed for no-excuse absentee voting outside of an emergency to make voting more convenient and easier for clerks to manage, but Republican lawmakers have mostly ignored their proposals.

That may be the reason for the clerks’ relatively moderate push.

Schoeller, for his part, said broader proposals would create obstacles they can’t afford in a crisis.

The next elections are set for June 2, when municipal elections postponed from April are set to take place. It's not clear the changes will be in effect by then or even by the August primaries, Schoeller said.

"My preference would be they make the changes sooner rather than later, though," he said.