Minnesota elections

Minnesotans have exceptional confidence in the fairness, accuracy, and integrity of our election procedures, and that confidence is seen year after year in the highest voter turnout in the country.
Minnesota officials, from the Secretary of State to county auditors to local election judges, take their roles seriously and have instituted a system with multiple checks to ensure the integrity of the state’s voter lists and election processes.
That’s why Secretary of State Steve Simon is right to resist efforts by the Trump administration to interfere in the state’s electoral system. The Trump administration recently filed suit against the state of Minnesota, and several other states, seeking to obtain the state’s voter rolls and the sensitive information, including home addresses, driver’s license numbers and partial Social Security numbers, in addition to data on voting history, contained within those rolls.
The Trump Justice Department, in a letter to states, vaguely cites federal laws that they contend give them authority to request this information from states, although Justice officials provide no specific information about how the information will be used (or more likely abused), and how it will be protected from unauthorized release. Nor do Justice officials provide any legal basis for their request.
As the Secretary of State’s legal counsel noted in a July 25 letter responding to the Justice Department’s requests, “it is long-standing practice of the [Office of Secretary of State] not to disclose any information contained on its statewide voter registration list unless expressly required by law.”
While Trump officials claim their request is related to “oversight,” there is little doubt that this request, as well as those made to several other states, is part of Trump’s seemingly never-ending quest to “prove” widespread voter fraud. Trump continues to claim, without a shred of evidence, that voter fraud cost him the 2020 election. And now that he’s in the White House, he’s undertaking a nationwide fishing expedition to prove that our elections (the very kind that put him back in the White House) are riddled with fraud. Trump’s theory, of course, is that elections are fraudulent when Democrats win, but fair and accurate when Republicans emerge victorious. Go figure.
While the Trump Justice Department claims it needs Minnesota’s voting data to investigate election integrity, the history of the department shows that its “investigations” are wholly political, driven by the demands of a president bent on retribution and vindication. Previous Justice Departments, at least since the Watergate era, identified evidence first, then built a case against a target based on the evidence. Under Attorney General Pam Bondi, that process has been reversed. Today, the target is identified first, usually under intense pressure from Trump himself, and then “evidence” is “trumped-up” in a desperate attempt to support a prosecution. This isn’t a matter of opinion. Trump pressures his attorney general to prosecute his enemies in explicit public posts on Truth Social and he has repeatedly fired U.S. attorneys for their refusal to seek indictments against his political opponents without evidence.
The lack of integrity isn’t with Minnesota’s election processes, it is within the Department of Justice under this president.
While the federal government has passed laws that pertain to state election processes, those have primarily been focused on ensuring every citizen the right to vote, which was a reaction to Southern states that restricted minority voting. We also had a federal response in the wake of the 2000 election debacle in Florida, which was intended to simplify voting processes.
But the U.S. Constitution is clear that elections and voting procedures are the purview of state governments, not federal officials. The founding fathers certainly didn’t want a president, for example, meddling with states’ elections for political purposes, which is exactly what President Trump is seeking to do now.
Minnesota’s elections have been tested multiple times in recount battles, including the statewide recount in the razor-tight U.S. Senate race between Al Franken and Norm Coleman. While many recounts will find a handful of small errors, those errors are invariably inadvertent, typically data entry mistakes by election officials, often working late at night to get the results out to the public. Those errors are inescapable since elections involve humans, but they don’t constitute voter fraud.
The checks put in place at both the state and county levels in Minnesota also ensure that ineligible individuals are not allowed to vote. The recent case of two individuals in the Twin Cities, who were charged criminally for submitting several hundred phony voter registration forms, is a case in point. System checks revealed the fraud, the fictitious names never made it onto the voter lists, and no fraudulent votes were ever cast. Minnesota’s system works as it’s supposed to. President Trump should keep his corrupt hands out of it.