The Rules of the Election Game
[option to develop the GAME to be played here as well]
In any game, rules lay out the terrain of play. Same goes for the Election Game.
In addition to the federal rules, in Minnesota elections, as in every state, there are rules. These are sometimes referred to as election laws. They may be referred to as codes or statutes, too. Minnesota statutes for elections have grown 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. In other words, the Executive Branch, not the Legislature, has currently written about thirty percent (30%), that is, about 130 pages of the nearly 500-page PDF of statutes and rules referred to as election laws.
Downloading the most recent 2023 and 2025 statutes and 2026 statutes is a start in surveying the rules of this game we call elections. The reader is encouraged to read not only those sections where prior experience informs their understanding (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 outside one’s experience.
One may further get a sense of the administrative side of elections by downloading the 2024 Election Judge Guide or the 2026 Election Judge Guide or the 2026 Combined Elections Calendar.
With rules in hand, it can be asked, From what framework shall we analyze them? This is where participation starts to matter. Let’s take that topic next.
END CHAPTER.
OUTTAKE (Aug 26 2026)
In the pages that follow, we will tend to focus on areas where there is daylight to improve the current audit process that is already within the rules. In other words, avenues citizen auditors can take, and perhaps more importantly, options that election managers and county auditors can exercise, to demonstrate the accuracy of the system as is, to the extent that it is.
If one is interested in following current events (or examine previously proposed bills) in the Minnesota House or the Minnesota Senate, look for the Minnesota House Elections Finance and Government Operations Committee (which in 2026 met Mondays and Wednesdays, 1pm, in Capitol G23) and the Minnesota Senate Elections Committee (which met Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3pm in Room 1200 Minnesota Senate Bldg)—both also have YouTube channels.
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 going deeper, will you come to the same conclusion as I, that it is nearly impossible, at least very difficult, to even begin to thoroughly audit Minnesota elections?
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 total, the 36-page decrease from 2023 to 2025 (and the further 6-page decrease for 2026) 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. Not even a one-word reply.
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.