Mo Dem Party Blows Off 27 Rural Counties

The Missouri Democratic Party’s party-only funded and managed Presidential Preference Primary took an odd turn recently when the Party posted its March 23rd Election Polling Places to their website. There’s a map of locations and an alphabetical list with addresses, oddly broken into four sets.

Missouri has 115 counties: 114 regular counties plus St. Louis City, a city and its own county.

Per State Party’s Delegate Selection Plan, each county will have at least one polling place. It turns out, however, that MDP failed to secure polling places for 27 counties with small populations in rural Missouri. These include:

Audrain
Atchison
Bates
Bollinger
Caldwell
Chariton
Clark
DeKalb
Harrison
Henry
Hickory
Holt
Knox
Lewis
Mercer
Mississippi
Monroe
New Madrid
Nodaway
Ozark
Pemiscot
Putnam
Ralls
Randolph
Reynolds
Schuyler
Scotland
Stone
Sullivan

MDP hired Merriman River Group to run the election but I don’t know who is to blame here given the dumpster fire that State Party has been for a very, very, very long time.

Is it possible that Missouri Democrats are still working on finding polling places. Sure. They have to be accessible, smoke free, available that Saturday morning, and probably have reliable internet/cell signal, a hard thing to find in small population rural counties in Missouri.

But that’s not what is going in here. According to Missourinet, “Most Missouri counties will have one polling place each, though some rural counties won’t have any in-person voting places.”

The only option for voters in 27 Missouri counties to vote in the Missouri Democratic Party Presidential Preference Primary is a) drive to the nearest county that has a polling place or b) vote by mail-in ballot. Deadline to request a mail-in ballot is Tuesday, March 12th.

I don’t know about the other counties, but there’s been no notice about this party-managed election in the weekly paper in Hickory County, The Index.

Someone paid for an ad in Thye Index, without “Paid for by,” for the Republican Caucus a couple of weeks before the March 2nd event. It was buried with legal notices for small town RFPs. People are still griping about not knowing about the Caucus and blaming it on unnamed RINO’s and, of course, Democrats. Imagine a facepalm emoji here.

This was a bad idea from the start. Democrats could have gone with a Caucus system. But Rusty Carnahan et al at MDP wanted Ranked Choice dark money to pay for the election but Democratic National Committee said no. See previous blog post on how this all started.

Blowing off 27 counties is just the latest in Missouri Democrats not getting it.

Please Vote for the re-election of President Joe Biden on November 5th (or earlier if you have the opportunity) and get your friends and family to vote… for democracy’s sake.