The Rules of the Election Game

In any game, the point of rules is to provide for and to support fair play and general enjoyment for all involved. Pick a sport: if, in a game of that sport, a player goes outside the rules, then other players, the referee, and sometimes the fans bring the offending player or party back into line, whether through encouragement, enforcement authority innate to the referee’s position, or, in the case of fans, through booing or whistling aiming to embarrass. Audits, whether through random drug tests or video replay, have begun to be introduced from cycling to football (American and international). Such audits are not without controversy. And then there is the layer of debate about what the rules ought to be, and why, and in the case of audits, how they ought to be done.

In Minnesota elections, as in every state, there are rules. These are referred to, sometimes, as election laws. They may be referred to as codes or statutes, too. Minnesota statutes for elections have developed in length and complication since the first Minnesota Statutes were published in 1858, shortly after Minnesota joined the union of states. The statutes aren’t the only rules: the statutes have been written to give the Minnesota Secretary of State the option to add rules or to clarify the statutes. I think this is unnecessary and allows for secretary of state to push an agenda outside the realm of the statutes. The current rules, here at the beginning of 2026, make up 132 pages of the 500-page PDF of statutes and rules.

In total, the 36-page decrease from 2023 to 2025 is, for me, trending in the right direction—less is more—and I have throughout my last five years of thinking about this been able to reduce those 500 pages to a single page. That version (found in the Appendices), however, is only my ideal version. The goal of this book is to start a conversation among many, many thousands of Minnesotans. Last year, in 2025, I helped to send a three-page version of the statutes (written by someone else) to nearly every (if not every) legislator, to which there were exactly zero responses.

Maybe the legislators want to hear from you; after all, it is you who has decided to read this and think about it at depth—up your game and they will likely up theirs. To have a productive conversation, we need something to look at. These rules can be looked at, even examined in depth, tracing the history of amendments, through the Minnesota Revisor’s website. Downloading the most recent 2023 and 2025 statutes is a start in surveying the rules of this game we call elections. I encourage you to read not only those sections where you feel comfortable (election judges will have experience with election day statutes, or IT specialists will be at home in the software-related sections), but also those areas where you have previously spent less effort or time or lack hands-on experiences.

One may further get a sense of the administrative side of elections by downloading the 2024 Election Judge Guide or the 2026 Combined Elections Calendar.

Authored bills relating to elections would generally come before these committees before going to the full House or Senate.

It’s one thing to agree that reviewing the rules is a good start to evaluating the overall Minnesota election system…

But from what framework shall we analyze them? This is where your participation starts to matter. Let’s take that topic next.