About the Author

Measureable desire for change was already clear on August 9, 2022. A scarcely 90-day campaign for Minnesota Secretary of State achieved about 36.8% of the vote (nearly 111,000 votes, if the reported numbers can be believed) running as a republican alternative to the MNGOP-endorsed candidate—after being effectively blocked from the endorsement process—but that was only part of the beginning of my education into the system of control that is our election system. It wasn’t until later that I sat down to read the more than 500-page rule book known as the election statutes and combine that information with my experience speaking with advocates, county auditors, city clerks, county commissioners, and numerous non-government advocates for fair and auditable elections.

During the brief campaign, input from political consultants was not sought and no campaign donations were accepted. Instead of a traditional campaign, which allows money to be funneled around and messages to be diluted or tailored to the political machine’s liking, the focus was on education and action. Instead of focusing on speaking events, county commissioner meetings (and city council meetings and town board meetings) were attended with the people, where we attempted to inform local decision makers of their options—at the time, in 2022, it was still up to the county and municipality whether they used electronic tabulators but that has since changed, removing their choice.

When invited to speak, in one case by a non-party affiliated group, and another time by an MNGOP-endorsed Republican candidate, MNGOP operatives tried to influence the organizers into cancelling: they did not back down to the pressure.

Running on a single issue, to repair elections with a particular focus on the tangled yet sophisticated web of the electronic voting system, was surprisingly simple and welcome. A bulk of the campaign was spent trying to get counties to turn over their cast vote records and ballot images (which at the time were still unclassified, public records); only one Minnesota county did for 2020 (Fillmore), about a month after I was given the first cast vote record file to my knowledge ever shown to the public, from the Chisago County primary election of August 9, 2022.

At the end of the previous year (2021), Crow Wing County commissioners with great encouragement from the people passed a resolution seeking to audit their county’s 2020 election. Instead of doing the audit themselves, though, they sent a request for help from the Secretary of State, Steve Simon. He rather quickly denied this request in early January, 2022, keeping the inner workings of the system closed to public viewing.

But even with the above ‘run for office’, I was somewhat late to the thinking about the Election System. Maybe my early career work in IT for a Fortune 100 helped me learn just enough about computers to follow the basic plot. Or maybe it was my interest in the tabletop board game Diplomacy, apparently one of JFK’s favorites, where there are no rules against nor to penalize cheating.

My vantage point into the opaque election system had only begun months earlier in an inquisitive way, around summer of 2021, online, through a Telegram group seeking Minnesota’s first true audit. Shortly after joining the online chat channel and volunteering to help out with communications, I was invited to a convention in South Dakota.

I would become one of perhaps only a few dozen people at each of the Cyber Symposium in Sioux Falls, South Dakota in August 2021, The Moment of Truth Summit in Springfield, Missouri, August 2022, and the Election Crime Bureau, Springfield, Missouri, in August 2023. From preparation for, participation in, and reflection on those multi-day events, I learned a great deal and realized how much more there was to learn. Those events were hosted by Mike Lindell, currently running for Governor of Minnesota in 2026.

In 2022 I attended a number of county commissioner, city council, and township supervisor meetings in a number of Minnesota counties, such as Dakota, Sherburne, and Wright, as well as various meetings with election officials, county election managers, and clerks included in the normal flow of elections (public accuracy tests in Wright or a canvassing/certification meeting in Hennepin) and sometimes because something had gone wrong (e.g. Dakota’s 2021 school board election).

In late 2022 and into 2023 my focus shifted to the budding group in Anoka County, which later decided to call themselves the Anoka County Election Integrity Team, or simply ACEIT, pronounced “Ace it”. That team became a hub for advocates from a number of counties, including Ramsey, Washington, Hennepin, and between 5 and 7 counties were represented (at the citizen level) for the 2024 Anoka County Canvassing/Certification Board meeting, an example of ACEIT’s impact. The group had educated its commissioners and supported a number of cities in not only asking to be including in the automatic hand count audits (called post-election reviews) but also in one case, the City of Oak Grove, of cancelling their KNOWiNK electronic poll pad leasing contract with Anoka County. ACEIT has done great work to help raise considerable awareness about the increasingly centralized system. Oak Grove’s action led to a letter, ostensibly sent by Anoka Elections Manager Tom Hunt, with clear help from Anoka County Auditor Brad Johnson, which also quotes Steve Simon, the Minnesota Secretary of State, to the election judges throughout Anoka County just ahead of the 2024 general election warning them not to use paper poll books, or else face a felony charge.