Preface

“The stories of these times will be told as all stories are told… around the campfire.”

— Nathan

“Be the change you seek.”

— Andrei

In Minnesota, we have paper ballots, yes, but computer scans of those ballots are counted instead of the ballots themselves. There’s no clear path to reviewing or auditing the digital records and therefore, with ballots and records likely not retained from previous elections, it’s becoming difficult to even say, for sure, what happened. All this has led to the people wanting change.

What change? To a process that everyone can understand and verify for themselves. That would be beautiful, wouldn’t it?

Measureable desire for change was already clear on August 9, 2022. My roughly 90-day Minnesota Secretary of State campaign garnered about 36.8% of the vote (nearly 111,000 votes) 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.

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 events, county commissioner meetings were attended with the people. When invited to speak, in one case by a non-party affiliated group, and another time by an endorsed Republican candidate, uniparty operatives tried to influence the organizers, who 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; 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, a request which Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon promptly denied 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 game. But there’s no doubt I became fascinated. Maybe my early career work in an IT-adjacent department for a Fortune 100 helped me have just enough understanding 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.

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.

It is a system with many features. Cheating can happen before and after the polls close. Absentee mail-in voting is out of control. Votes can be hijacked from people who didn’t even vote. A ballot inserted into a tabulator won’t necessarily read a voter’s choices accurately. After unofficial results are in and after those unofficial results are made official through certifications at the county and then state canvassing boards, without properly checking the accuracy of the results, legitimate and proper audits—sometimes called full forensic audits—are avoided by the powers that be at all costs.

Indeed, the attempts to block even basic questions being asked has alerted many, many more to the seriousness of the issue. So you’re saying I can’t ask questions, but you’re also saying everything is fine? There’s a moment in Star Wars: A New Hope, where, in the detention corridor command post, while he and Luke Skywalker are in the process of rescuing the Princess, Han Solo decides to blast the communication link because he wasn’t able to answer the questions being asked. “Boring conversation anyway… LUKE, WE’RE GONNA HAVE COMPANY!”

The administrators of elections did get company. A deluge of emails. Phone calls. In-person meetings. And yet, despite the questions and clear demand for openness with respect to public government work and records, as if to demonstrate they’d learned little from the aftermath of 2020, only 1 of the 87 Minnesota counties even released the automatically-generated cast vote record (CVR) reports from Minnesota’s August 9, 2022 primary election. (Or they had learned it was best not to give the people anything to go on.)

Readers may wonder how the solitary report was attained. It was by email in PDF format from Chisago after a phone conversation, whose county election manager had promised to provide the report (but not the ballot images, which the computers read to interpret the vote tallies) after admitting election records from 2020 were not retained the federally required 22 months thanks to a Hart vendor software update seemingly quite similar to the Trusted Build that led to the Tina Peters story in Mesa County, Colorado.

Like any election, without a full forensic audit of ballots, ballot envelopes, election equipment, and registration systems, the integrity of the systems, process, and results can never be confirmed by the voters, which was reason enough for countries like Germany to do away with electronic voting equipment altogether. Many countries have banned both mail-in voting and electronic equipment, for obvious reasons, but reasons that will be unpacked in this book.

A friend asked me in early 2024: How unreliable do we want our elections to be?

Fifth graders, who cannot lawfully vote (yet)—although 16 and 17-year olds are now pre-registered in Minnesota—should be able to understand how votes are counted. From the optimistic viewpoint, we are poised as a country and state to return to manual hand counting and tallying of paper ballots (which fifth graders could understand) in small, manageable precincts on election day. Examples from France to Taiwan are there for us to learn from if need be. Mail-in voting could be outlawed and voters will have to show some form of identification to prove citizenship and local residence to receive a ballot. Then everything gets counted by humans under video surveillance (even livestreamed) for anyone to watch or review after the fact.

The simplicity of this overall approach, and its extremely low cost, when considering many have and will volunteer for such a service to their local city, town, or county, will make future generations frown in disbelief at how we even went down the insecure electronic road (combined with mass mail-in) and indeed how long it took to right the ship, to reclaim control over our government, a necessary task given larger issues of contention to come.

To distract from genuine reports from citizen journalists depicting this lack of transparency and obstruction of public data releases, election corruption deniers—starting with the mainstream media—endlessly parroted and continue to repeat tired talking points. Safest and most secure! Not connected to the internet! A perfect election! So effective is their repetition that some come to believe their banal lies. The narrative is very important. Propaganda, with the current tools, is VERY cheap, especially to a population that on balance does not think, that is meanwhile addicted to propaganda. A neighbor recently said, “The election is over.” Maybe that’s what they want you to think.

So strange is this effect that it might be compared to Mr. Smith taking over a civilian’s body in The Matrix. Most election clerks and auditors robotically claim they are following election law and election guides from the secretary of state—some making these remarks with a smirk on the edge of their mouths—while withholding basic data requested from their offices in violation of data practice laws. This effect is so odd that one can start to seriously consider whether AI-implemented mind control tech has not already been rolled out en masse, or if indeed the thought of upsetting one’s superiors, or the electronic vendor, is too much to bother with.

And still potential allies ask, Where’s the proof?

But we can counter… Were there ever any actual problems with a simple hand count of paper ballots in small precincts? Was the purpose of more technology concentrated in a handful of companies really to make our elections less transparent? Less comprehensible? With databases like the voter rolls and registrations and poll worker data increasingly centralized in the hands of secretaries of state? (And in cases like Konnech, Inc., alleged to be stored on Chinese servers, whose product, PollChief, operates in cities like Minneapolis and used to, in cities like Detroit, where the revelation caused backlash and cancellation.)

Or could it be that the intricately connected companies and organizations comprising the election process like Runbeck, Dominion, Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Scytl, Edison Research, ERIC, Konnech, BPro, and KNOWiNK (and all the various private entities and sources of funding) be exactly what it looks like?

In 1910 men representing a quarter of the planet’s wealth secretly met on Jekyll Island to prepare the way for The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 (originally the Aldridge Act, which was then copied from the opposing political party), which Minnesota’s Charles A. Lindbergh Sr. opposed, suggesting its passage meant selling the nation’s children and grandchildren into slavery.

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 established a banking cartel. What we are witnessing now is the exposure of the election cartel and all its players, who play for keeps.

At day’s end the illusion of a functioning election process is just one of many programs to uninstall from society, alongside global financial controls like the Fed and central banks, medical tyranny orchestrated by the WHO and its allies, the captivity instantiated by one’s USA Inc. birth certificate and social security number, and the daily chem trails threatening all of Life.

This deprogramming, deconditioning, and cleanup is necessary because the current settings enable too much harm to be done, especially to those who cannot protect themselves, like children.

The first edition in 2022 of this book was written quickly during the SOS campaign and contained many mistakes. (The second edition edited in even less time, 2024, with this quick update occuring on a single day, March 9, 2025.) Thankfully readers were forgiving and even shared it both with one another and with their county commissioners, making it an uncensorable resource for truth and an antidote to wilful ignorance and plausible deniability. Indeed, one of the commissioners shown this resource in 2022 in early 2025 voted against the purchase of new KNOWiNK electronic poll pads. Even though he was on the losing side of the vote, that commissioner showed he was listening and working to improve things from his position.

In this now third edition, corrections have been made and updates are offered in the following areas—lists for 2nd edition and 3rd below:

3rd edition

missing information related to the Trojan horse of Minnesota elections, the electronic poll pad software system from KNOWiNK, a 3rd party private vendor with considerable access to election data, with the capability to monitor and modify data
a revised and focused ‘What We Can Do’ (Chapter 7) for 2025 and 2026, especially for city councils and town boards, consider The Oak Grove Way (paper poll books, process own absentee ballots, and hand count audit)
emphasis on contributions from Suan Smith and Rick Weible - see bonus chapter, excerpt from forthcoming book featuring Susan and Rick
general updates for clarity and relevancy to 2025 readers

2nd edition

repositioned the history of voting machines (Chapter 1)
a clarification about cast vote records and ballot images (Chapter 6)
added county-level field notes, observations, and suggestions from a few Minnesota counties, in particular for Stearns and Anoka (Chapter 6)
added a new chapter, What We Can Do (Chapter 7)
commentary on newly added or amended Minnesota Statutes (Chapter 7)
anecdotes and snippets from meetings and conversations with grassroots leaders country-wide (throughout)
moved the anecdote about living one year in Beijing (Appendix)
included Susan Smith’s post-trial brief relevant to all Minnesotans (Chapter 6) - read the brief now right here as well as a FICTIONAL version as an excerpt from an upcoming book

As a mentor has said, the stories of these times will be told around the campfire, passed down from generation to generation. Please bear that in mind as what is shared in this book comes merely from my experience, a way to put my observations, recollections, and insights into readers’ hands.

Therefore, do not take anything here as authoritative but rather take the information on board to consider and to verify for oneself. It is sometimes hard but often refreshing to discover one has been quite wrong about something. If only to take responsibility for any harm done and to prepare to learn the next thing one is wrong about or about which he had barely even considered.

It’s been quite the journey, hasn’t it?

And there is much more to do.

Erik van Mechelen
March 9, 2025