State Rep. Jim Murphy, R-St. Louis County, presents his bill Tuesday, to ban automatic, recurring political donations in Missouri (Rudi Keller/Missouri Independent).
Missouri politicians wouldn’t be able to lure donors into recurring contributions with emotional appeals that don’t disclose who would benefit from the money under a bill heard Tuesday.
State Rep. Jim Murphy, a Republican from St. Louis County, said the scheme leaves contributors, who are often elderly people, confused when thousands of dollars are drawn from their accounts months, or years, after they respond to a fundraising email or text.
“If it’s not fraud, then it’s certainly something that hurts every one of us,” Murphy said as he presented his bill to the House Elections Committee.
The committee also heard a bill that would restore the presidential primary, which was eliminated in 2022, as well as double the time allowed for early voting from two weeks to four weeks. A vote on both bills is expected next week.
Murphy’s bill is a response to fundraising tactics used by former state Sen. Bill Eigel, a Republican from St. Charles, who used it to finance his unsuccessful bid for governor in 2024 and is pulling money from donors to that campaign to fund his bid this year for St. Charles County executive.
Murphy said he filed the bill after The Independent reported in November that a 92-year-old Nebraska veteran who thought he had given once to Eigel’s campaign in 2023 was tapped 35 times, for $1,050 total, from December 2024 through Sept. 30 because of an automatic recurring donation.
Russell Wood is one of 141 people nationally — including six from Missouri — who made multiple donations to Eigel’s 2024 campaign for governor who are also contributors to his St. Charles County executive race.
How a Nebraska veteran unwittingly became a repeat donor to a Missouri county campaign
One retired woman in Texas, who made 143 donations to Eigel’s campaign for governor, contributed $1,205 in 74 separate donations since December 2024.
BILL PAC, a separate committee that promotes Eigel’s campaigns, also uses the tactic.
The latest campaign donation reports are due Thursday and will show whether those donations continued during the final quarter of the year.
Eigel’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment on the bill.
Murphy’s bill would ban any political committee from accepting automatically recurring donations although, under questioning, he said he would be willing to change it to allow people to set up recurring donations if they wish.
The bill would also require solicitations to “state clearly, in a clear and conspicuous manner” which candidate or committee would benefit from a donation.
Murphy did not name Eigel during Tuesday’s hearing but said his campaign was soliciting contributions without giving his name but with an appeal that brought an emotional response.
“As it turned out, there were elderly people that said, ‘oh, yeah, I’m against this particular issue, so therefore I’m going to give $20 to fight this issue’,” Murphy said. “They had no idea where the money was really going to and then years later, they’re still trying to get off the automatic contribution rolls, and it’s turned into thousands of dollars.”
If the bill passed, it would not stop candidates for federal office from using solicitations that create automatic, recurring donations, Murphy said in response to questions.
The problem, he said, isn’t limited to federal candidates and needs a state response.
“Politicians don’t have the best reputation in the world,” he said. “Some of it is deserved and some of it is certainly not. But when campaigns do things like this, they certainly do not do any of us a service and they don’t do the country any service.”
Presidential primary
Missouri conducted its first presidential primary in 1988 but did not have a regular primary until 2000. The law authorizing the primary was repealed in 2022, but confusion in 2024 over how national convention delegates are selected shows it should be restored, state Rep. Peggy McGaugh, a Republican from Carrollton, told the elections committee.
“We found it was even worse, and it was hard to manage for the parties,” McGaugh said of using a caucus system instead of a primary.
A similar bill passed the House last year but did not come up for a vote in the state Senate.
The primary would be held on the first Tuesday in March of each presidential election year. The bill does not require political parties to allocate delegates based on the primary results and actual delegates would continue to be chosen in party caucuses and conventions.
The bill including a presidential primary is a wide-ranging elections bill backed by county clerks and election authorities statewide. It would extend the early voting period, increase the area around a polling place where political solicitations are banned from 25 to 50 feet and allow more time for candidates seeking local offices to file their candidacies.
McGaugh said she attached the extension of early voting — called no-excuse absentee voting and currently only allowed for the final two weeks before an election — because it has proven to be wildly popular.
The bill would double that period to four weeks.
Long lines formed in both urban and rural counties as people took advantage of the law, she said. Election authorities like it because it gives them time to solve individual voter problems, McGaugh added.
“It was exciting,” she said. “It brought excitement back to voting.”
Missourians can vote absentee as early as six weeks before the election but must be able to show a reason, such as having a disability or being away from home, to vote that early.
Kurt Bahr, director of elections for St. Charles County, said he saw about 300 voters per day using the traditional reasons for voting absentee but the number jumped to 4,000 to 5,000 per day once the early voting period began.
“We’d love to see all six weeks but I don’t think there is enough agreement in this building,” Bahr said.
The early voting period was included in the 2022 bill that ended the presidential primary. That law also required voters to show a government-issued ID card, with photo, date of birth and an expiration date, prior to voting.
Republicans opposed early voting and wrote the bill to end it if a court struck down the identification requirement. It was upheld by a Cole County judge in November 2024 but the decision was appealed and a ruling is pending from the Missouri Supreme Court.
McGaugh’s bill would not remove the link between the provisions of law.
Voters like early voting and a longer period would make the process go smoother, Bahr said.
“It was insanity,” he said, “not just in St Charles County, but every county, even rural counties, because of how many people were trying to come in and vote.”