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Southeast Missourian

Cape County clerk defends county election integrity to speaker at Guardians of Liberty event

By J.C. Reeves and Keenan Baker ~ Southeast Missourian
Friday, June 21, 2024
Cape Girardeau County Clerk Kara Clark Summers (right) took issue with allegations of lax election security in the county made by a speaker at a Guardians of Liberty event Tuesday, May 18, in Jackson.
Southeast Missourian file

Election fraud has been a hot topic in the United States ever since Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, prompting former president Donald Trump to claim the election was stolen.

Since then, physicist Dr. Douglas Frank has been going from state to state giving presentations on alleged fraud in the 2020 presidential election and encouraging citizens to rise up to defend election integrity. Frank was the featured speaker for the non-partisan group Guardians of Liberty’s monthly meeting Tuesday, June 18, at Delmonico’s Steakhouse in Jackson.

Frank — also known as the “Johnny Appleseed of Elections” — spoke for approximately an hour and a half, presenting information about how he and his team, which includes My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, allegedly uncovered massive amounts of voter fraud and how voters are “fighting a war” to stop rigged elections.

During a question and answer session following Frank's presentation, Cape Girardeau County Clerk Kara Clark Summers and Frank became engaged in a tense back-and-forth discussion regarding election security in the county.

Early in his journey to prove widespread election fraud, Frank said he was “finding fraud in every county in every state". Throughout his presentation, Frank alleged that county clerks in Missouri, and throughout the United States, aren't truly in control of their elections.

“Your clerk may feel they're in control of elections, but it's easy for me to prove they’re not,” Frank said, “and when I sit down with the clerks, I show them that.”

Frank’s allegations during the presentation included groups of people printing ballots and materials to match county stationery, voter rolls not being clean and the secretary of state being able to add and remove voters from the rolls at will, among others.

Summers, however, denied these allegations when allowed to speak. She asked Frank whether he agreed or disagreed that “a lot of these problems that you talked about today are with state’s laws because all state laws are different.”

“I feel like we have good election laws in Missouri,” Summers said. “We can tweak a few of our election laws, but I feel like we have very good election laws. … We don't have ballot drop boxes, a student cannot take other students’ ballots because they have to get those ballots notarized, and we don't count absentee ballots until election night.

“Other states have laws that allow votes to come in after election day, other states have ballot drop boxes, other states have these things that you're discussing, but we don't in Missouri.”

According to the Missouri secretary of state’s website, election security means include providing no single point of access by allowing each jurisdiction to use its own voting system, not connecting voting machines to the internet, requiring machines to produce a paper audit trail, processing absentee ballots with a bipartisan team, testing machines before and after election day, locking and sealing machines once they’ve been tested, requiring machines to allow voters a second chance to ensure their ballot is marked correctly and having local election officials audit the results before they’re certified.

Summers denied Frank’s accusation of Cape Girardeau County having dirty voter rolls, explaining she has a staff member whose main responsibility is to update them daily. Additionally, Summers said her staff sends out any requested mail-in ballots directly from her office and that each ballot is checked and signed by her staff. In response, Frank praised the county’s election system and suggested separating from the state.

“You don’t need the state system. It sounds like you have a good system, so why don’t you divorce yourself from the state system?” Frank asked. “By using it, you’re enabling them and justifying their use everywhere else. You don’t have to comply with any law or policy which violates your constitutional rights, and you are being disenfranchised from your constitutional rights right now because this system is stealing your votes in other counties.”

In an interview Wednesday afternoon, June 19, Summers explained she wasn’t trying to argue with Frank, but felt compelled to defend herself and her staff from his allegations that county clerks have “taken a passive stance on cleaning the (voter) rolls".

“I waited purposefully for everybody to ask their questions because I didn't want to come across as argumentative or that I was trying to railroad his whole talk,” Summers said. “He did say some valid things, but a lot of the things he was saying did not apply to Missouri's laws.”

Summers said she regularly asks for people to help work the election in Cape Girardeau County to learn the process and see for themselves that there is no fraud occurring. She also emphasized that results could change during election week because provisional ballots and mail-in ballots submitted by members of the military who are overseas — which are accepted until noon Friday of election week throughout Missouri — get counted after in-person votes.

“I tell (people) to get involved and to come and work the elections,” Summers said. “Everything's open. If you don't want to work, come observe it, because every process we do is open to the public. People can show up and watch anytime they want.

“Everybody just wants to see something and think that all this fraud is happening and ask, ‘Why did the results change?’ That's why I'm trying to talk about these things like provisional ballots and the military and overseas (ballots) because if it’s close, it could change.”

In an interview Wednesday, District 146 Rep. Barry Hovis said, “We should always have a conversation when it comes to our voting integrity” but also defended Summers’ work with elections in the county.

“One of the things that I took away from listening to him speak last night is that I got the impression that he thought all elections were bad and rigged. Maybe he wasn’t saying all of them are bad, but he said a lot of them are, and I don't agree with that in Missouri elections,” Hovis said. “I believe that our election clerk here, Kara Clark Summers, is top-notch. If she knew anybody that was trying to pack the ballots, do something unlawful or do something illegal, she would be calling the police to report them immediately.

“I don't want people to come away with the impression that all of our elections are rigged.”

During his presentation, Frank often told the audience, “We are at war,” and encouraged them to utilize their Second Amendment right to maintain a well-regulated militia in anticipation of violence because of the November election’s outcome.

“We are at war, and if you're not thinking this way, you’ve already lost,” Frank said during his presentation. “You have to wake up and realize we are at war. They are taking our country away from us every day, we are losing our liberties minute by minute incrementally and if you don’t fight like a war, you’re losing. …

“Your right to bear arms, it's not really a right to bear arms. It's your obligation to maintain a well-regulated militia. How is the militia doing here? Do you have one? Uh oh, you better get one. You need to have a militia. If there was ever a year in my life when I would have said that, it’s this year. There's going to be violence this year so you better have your militia up and going.”

Because of the current political climate in the United States, Summers said she has been speaking with clerks in surrounding counties about having an increased security presence in November.

“We are going to contact all of our law enforcement, emergency management departments, fire departments and those things and talk to them about what we might be facing in November,” Summers said. “We're going to all have a meeting about it just to say, ‘This is real and we all need to be vigilant on election day, because it is very concerning.’”

Southeast Missourian reporter Keenan Baker contributed to this article

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