Missouri's former election integrity director, a Republican with 14 years of experience running county elections, filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging Secretary of State Denny Hoskins fired him for flagging staff schemes, including a plot to file a fake complaint using a burner phone.
Nicholas La Strada brought the suit Monday in Cole County court, naming Hoskins and the Secretary of State's office as defendants. The petition lays out a series of allegations that, if proven, would amount to a pattern of lawless conduct inside the very office charged with safeguarding Missouri's elections. La Strada claims he lost his job effective May 1, just months after Hoskins hired him in January 2025, because he refused to stay quiet about what he witnessed.
The lawsuit lands at a moment when Hoskins is already under extraordinary legal pressure. The Missouri Supreme Court found him temporarily in contempt just days earlier for defying its order on congressional redistricting. And on Friday, voters who signed a referendum petition filed a separate class-action suit seeking monetary damages against him over the same redistricting dispute. La Strada's case adds a new front: allegations of internal misconduct, retaliation, and an office willing to sideline the one person whose job title was election integrity.
The most striking allegation in the petition reported by the New York Post involves what La Strada says he personally witnessed. He claims he was present for a conversation in which several members of Hoskins' staff discussed using a "burner phone" and an internet protocol address scrambler to file a fake whistleblower complaint. The target was a federal administrative proceeding involving Missouri's voter registration database.
La Strada says he raised concerns about the scheme directly with Hoskins, not once, but twice. The response, he alleges, was not an investigation or a correction. It was punishment. His Capitol security badge was deactivated before a hearing in the voter database case. Then came the termination.
The lawsuit also alleges Hoskins' office illegally intervened in a close city council race in Marshall, a small city in central Missouri. After results had already been certified, the Secretary of State's office allegedly received a complaint about the tallying of draft-in votes, recounted them itself, and then directed local election officials to change the outcome. The suit contends that only a judge has the authority to order such a change, meaning the office overstepped its legal role and effectively overrode a certified local election on its own say-so.
A separate allegation targets the office's use of taxpayer money. La Strada claims Hoskins' office spent state funds to mail information opposing a St. Louis County ballot measure, a politically oriented expenditure that, if accurate, would raise serious questions about the misuse of public resources for partisan purposes.
When La Strada flagged the mailing issue, the suit says, the office stripped him of his administrative access to the state's voter registration system. That pattern, raise a concern, lose access, lose your badge, lose your job, is the core of the retaliation claim.
Anne Marie Moy, a spokesperson for Hoskins, told reporters the office "will not be able to comment on pending litigation involving a personnel matter." She confirmed that the election integrity director post remains vacant. Hoskins himself offered no public statement.
That silence leaves every allegation in the lawsuit uncontested in the public record, at least for now. No law enforcement or oversight body has publicly announced an investigation into the claims. The specific federal proceeding involving the voter database has not been identified in available reporting, nor have the before-and-after results of the Marshall city council race been disclosed. Those gaps matter, and they deserve answers.
Election integrity disputes have drawn increasing scrutiny nationwide. In Michigan, six individuals faced charges over illegal voting in the 2024 election, and in New York, a state court ordered a new school board election after a clerk allegedly destroyed ballots to rig the outcome.
La Strada was not a political operative parachuted into a state job. He spent 14 years as Pettis County clerk, overseeing elections at the local level, the kind of hands-on experience that should have made him a valued asset in a secretary of state's office. Hoskins hired him in January 2025 to fill a role explicitly dedicated to election integrity.
By May 1, he was gone. The timeline the lawsuit describes is compressed and damning in its sequence: hired in January, witnessed alleged misconduct in April, raised alarms, lost access, lost his badge, and was terminated, all within roughly four months. The speed of the retaliation, if the allegations hold, suggests the office moved quickly to silence an internal critic rather than address the problems he identified.
Erin N. Vernon, the Independence, Missouri, attorney leading La Strada's case, spoke with reporters Monday at the Cole County Courthouse in Jefferson City. She framed the stakes bluntly:
"How can you trust a secretary of state's office when they fired the man who was telling them what they cannot do?"
Vernon also pointed to the Marshall city council race as a warning about what unchecked authority can produce. Concerns about election administration overreach have surfaced in other states as well, including Arizona, where the state Supreme Court recently ruled on a dispute over control of election duties in Maricopa County.
"If you've done it once, what's to stop them from doing it on bigger elections in November and coming right in and changing it to who they want, their preferred candidate?"
La Strada's whistleblower suit is the third legal action to hit Hoskins in the span of a few days. On Thursday, the Missouri Supreme Court found him temporarily in contempt for taking steps to use new U.S. House districts backed by President Donald Trump in the November election, in defiance of the court's order. On Friday, voters who had signed a referendum petition filed a separate class-action suit seeking monetary damages tied to Hoskins' handling of the congressional redistricting fight.
Each case involves a different set of facts, but together they describe an office that appears willing to act outside its legal authority, whether that means defying a state supreme court order, directing local officials to alter certified election results, or allegedly plotting to file fraudulent complaints in federal proceedings. That is a serious accumulation of legal exposure for any statewide officeholder, let alone one responsible for the integrity of elections.
Separately, questions about who oversees the overseers have arisen at the federal level too. President Trump recently removed Democratic members of the Election Assistance Commission, citing Supreme Court authority, a move that underscored the ongoing debate over how election administration is structured and who holds the power to shape it.
In Wyoming, Governor Mark Gordon called for a state investigation into the conduct of DOJ election monitors, reflecting broader conservative concerns about accountability within election oversight bodies.
Missouri's election integrity director position, the role La Strada held for barely four months, remains empty. Moy, the spokesperson, confirmed the vacancy but offered no timeline for filling it. An office that fired its own integrity watchdog and then left the post unfilled is an office that, by its own actions, has signaled how much value it places on internal accountability.
The allegations in La Strada's lawsuit are, for now, one side of a legal dispute. Hoskins has not responded on the merits. But the facts already in the public record, the contempt finding, the class-action suit, the vacant integrity post, and the office's refusal to comment, form a picture that Missouri voters deserve to see clearly before November.
When the man hired to guard election integrity says the office itself was the threat, and the office's only answer is silence, the silence speaks loudly enough.
