The Minnesota campaign drawing probably the most national attention – and probably the most national money – isn’t the race for governor or the 2nd Congressional District. As an alternative, it’s the race to find out whether DFLer Steve Simon wins a 3rd term as secretary of state.
Simon was amongst a handful of elections officials on the duvet of Time magazine who were depicted as “The Defenders: Contained in the Fight to Save America’s Elections.” He faces GOP nominee Kim Crockett, who desires to curtail early voting and limit absentee ballots.
This often sleepy, down-ballot contest is that this yr considered one of a handful of secretary of state races across the U.S. testing whether the Donald Trump-led denial of the 2020 election results has political potency.
“The Real Winner of GOP’s 2022 Primaries Was Denial of 2020 Election,” read one headline from Bloomberg. “Dems light up airwaves in key secretary of state races,” was the headline in Politico. Each include the Minnesota race amongst those being targeted.
And it’s not nearly national news stories. But the identical campaigns making headlines, at the very least on the Democratic side, are being supported by tens of millions of dollars of television and digital campaign ads in addition to junk mail – each supporting their reelections and denouncing their GOP opponents.
The Democratic Association of Secretaries of State and its campaign arm SAFE (Secure Accessible Fair Elections) announced it had launched an $11 million effort – one the organization says could grow to $25 million – to defend Simon and other incumbents in Michigan, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia. DASS, because it is typically called, lacked a full-time political staff until two years ago.
Up to now, $2.5 million has been booked on Minnesota television – about $1.8 million within the Twin Cities and $800,000 in Duluth, in keeping with records filed by the stations with the Federal Communications Commission. Simon is a vice chair of DASS, a tax-exempt group organized under Section 527 of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code whose purpose is to elect or defeat candidates for federal, state or local public office.
DASS executive director Kim Rogers called the spending unprecedented and is available in response to each the COVID-19 pandemic and continued misinformation in regards to the 2020 election.
“The largest thing since 2020 is that there was a seismic shift in elections,” Rogers said. The ad, called “Decision” praises Simon for defending elections and attacks Crockett. “This November, our rights are under attack,” the narrator says. It uses video of Crockett describing herself as “the election denier in chief,” video she says was taken out of context to cover that she was mocking accusations made against her to that effect. Nevertheless it accurately says she desires to shorten the early voting period and needs fewer voters using absentee or mail voting.
One other media campaign is run by iVote, a national organization began in 2014 to advertise voting rights and voter access in addition to support candidates for election supervision jobs, mostly secretaries of state. It has purchased $454,000 value of ads on KSTP, in keeping with FCC filings which might be to run from Sept. 26 to election day. It has made inquiries about purchases with WCCO, KARE and KMSP. Politico reported that the group plans to spend $2 million in Minnesota and Michigan. Former Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie is on the board of iVote.
Each DASS (as SAFEMN) and iVote have registrations with the Minnesota Campaign Finance Board, but most of their activity is just not reported to either the CFB or the Federal Election Commission. As 527 organizations, named for the section of IRS tax law, they avoid disclosure by not “expressly” advocating for votes for or against candidates.
Quarterly IRS filings do require disclosure of donors but they are usually not as timely as campaign finance reports.
Simon has also ratcheted up fundraising for his own campaign. First elected in 2014 to succeed Ritchie, Simon has raised $1.26 million this election after raising just $340,503 in 2018, including $55,000 in public campaign subsidy. Simon is foregoing the general public money this yr because it might have limited how much he could spend to $483,000 under this system’s rules.
Crockett is just not benefiting from robust fundraising nor from national organizations spending in Minnesota. She has raised just over $314,000 as of probably the most recent state filings. Of that total, $66,695 was from the general public subsidy program. She has attempted, nevertheless, to make use of the cash flowing to Simon and against her to encourage donations to her campaign.
“These dark-money attacks are filled with vicious lies and landing in Minnesota mailboxes already,” she wrote in a single fundraising appeal. “The TV and radio ads can be relentless. They’re eager to do anything … lie, cheat, or steal, to maintain Steve Simon in office.”
‘Train wreck’ or ‘big lie’?
The secretary of state’s race isn’t the one campaign talking in regards to the 2020 election. GOP nominee for governor Scott Jensen said in April that Simon “perhaps higher take a look at to see should you look good in stripes, since you’ve gotten away with an excessive amount of, too long.” He repeated the road on the state GOP convention in Rochester in May.
Several local party organizations have centered fundraisers around showings of “2000 Mules,” the Dinesh D’Souza documentary that claims it has proof of ballot harvesting and other vote fraud. Crockett has appeared at such events. (FactCheck.org has fact-checked the allegations within the documentary and terms the result “speculative” and failing to supply the definite proof the producers claim. Former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr called the film unimpressive and based on a faulty premise about cellphone geotracking data. It didn’t change his view that the 2020 election “was not stolen by fraud.”)
Crockett has made election changes the centerpiece of her candidacy.
“I worked hard to stop the train wreck of the 2020 election after which examine the wreckage to make certain it never happened again,” Crockett told delegates on the GOP convention in Rochester in May. Simon, she said, used COVID “as cover to alter how we vote but in addition how the vote was counted.”
The latter is a reference to 1 theme of GOP complaints in regards to the 2020 election. A bipartisan bill was adopted before the election to advertise mail voting as a way of reducing the variety of voters in polling places. The priority was that scientific knowledge in regards to the virus and its transmissibility wasn’t yet clear and reducing in-person voting was a partial solution. Some 58 percent of Minnesota votes were forged via the mail that election, greater than double previous elections.
The identical bill prolonged the time period when local election officials could begin processing mail ballots from seven days to 14 days. However the law specifically said there could be no extension of the deadline for accepting mailed ballots. That they had to be received by 8 p.m. election evening.
That summer, three lawsuits were filed by groups including the NAACP, League of Women Voters and a bunch representing retirees in search of further change. Simon expected to lose those suits, so he entered into a consent decree that waived a requirement that mail ballots be witnessed and signed by one other registered voter. It also said local elections staff could accept mailed ballots received as much as two days after the election.
GOP interests challenged that decree because it applied to the presidential election only, losing in federal district court but prevailing somewhat on the eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. That court said there was no legal authority for the state to increase the ballot acceptance period by two days without legislative approval. It ordered elections offices to separate ballots received after 8 p.m. election evening within the event that the plaintiffs challenged the legality of counting them.
Ultimately, Biden won by well greater than the variety of ballots received after 8 p.m. on election night, and no challenge was filed. The ballots were included in the ultimate tally.
Crockett also told delegates, “I’ve been attacked by the company media that might wish to shut us all up … cancel culture stops here.” She called for a return to “voting in person and rejecting the insecure, chaotic absentee balloting system and voting over wireless equipment connected to the web.” (Minnesota law prohibits web connectivity of voting machines.)
After winning the party endorsement, Crockett said she had spent loads of time on the campaign trail with the GOP candidates for governor and attorney general and so they had picked up her talking points in regards to the 2020 election.
“I’ve been harping on election integrity since day one,” she said. “And over the previous couple of months of the campaign, it was so interesting. Impulsively it seemed like everyone was running for secretary of state. So, they got the memo.”
For his part, Simon has been doing battle with legislative Republicans over bills he said are inspired by “the large lie” in regards to the 2020 results.
Election security and Zuckerberg grants
During Sunday’s debate between Simon and Crockett on WCCO radio the pair disagreed on several issues related to election security. Simon repeated his assertion that Minnesota elections, including the 2020 election, are fundamentally fair and protected. He said top-in-the-nation turnout by Minnesota voters is an endorsement of that assertion, saying the state balances voter access with vote security. Voting irregularities were “microscopic” in number, Simon said.
As he has because the start of the campaign, Simon said Crockett is engaged in a “hyper-partisan” attack on election integrity and is engaging in “increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories.” Such attacks on the integrity of the 2020 election –dismissed by Trump’s own Justice Department and FBI in addition to dozens of judges across the U.S. – contributed to attacks on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Feeding those theories of election fraud “is irresponsible. It’s disqualifying,” he said.
Crockett accused Simon – and the news media – of dismissing what she said were legitimate concerns in regards to the election, concerns that may very well be assuaged with using photo ID to vote and provisional ballots for many who register on election day. She said the 46-day early voting period is “excessive” and that it presents voters with the chance of voting before some necessary events or information is understood.
“Voters don’t feel listened to,” she said. Crockett also accused Simon of favoring voter convenience over election security. “I don’t think I’d be running, I don’t think I’d be putting myself through this adventure, if I felt that the administration of elections couldn’t stand some significant improvement.”
Simon opposes photo ID for actual voting, noting that state voters rejected a photograph ID requirement in 2012. A driver’s license number, state ID number or the last 4 digits of a social security number are currently needed to register to vote. He also opposes provisional ballots because they’d create a “perhaps” pile of ballots and require those voters to undergo additional steps including visiting elections offices in person after elections if their ballot is challenged.
He also noted that mail ballots are matched against an identification number chosen by each voter after they apply for such ballots, a system he said is best than attempting to match signatures.
The 2 also debated one other common theme of those that said the 2020 election was flawed. That’s the distribution of $350 million in grants to elections offices across the country by a nonprofit created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. A spokesperson for the Center for Tech and Civic Life said the grants help election offices “have the staffing, training, and equipment obligatory” for a smooth election.
Republicans accuse Zuckerberg of using the cash to spice up turnout in blue areas and to infiltrate election administration. A bill within the state Senate last session would have banned such grants.
“Imagine if the National Rifle Association or some conservative organization had done that,” Crockett said.
Simon said it’s legitimate to debate whether government should accept such money from nonprofits. “But in 2020, the cash was utilized in a non-partisan way for administrative purposes during a really, very difficult time,” he said.
Simon and the spokesperson for the Center for Tech and Civic Life identified all national applicants, red areas and blue areas, got funding. In Minnesota, grants were spent on such items as printing more mail ballots to fulfill increased demand, renting extra space so Minneapolis election staff and voters could unfolded, and the acquisition of a folder-inserter machine for mailings in Nobles County.
Through the session, Simon called GOP complaints in regards to the use of cash “a paranoid fantasy” that was a part of the election denial campaign to scale back trust in elections.
At the top of the WCCO debate, the 2 candidates were asked in the event that they would accept the outcomes of the 2022 count.
Simon endorsed the people and processes set as much as run state elections. “I’m confident that this election, having learned from 2020, having thrived and passed that ultimate stress test, that we’re poised for a really, very successful election in Minnesota.”
“I believe that’s form of an odd query,” Crockett said. “We aren’t there yet. We’re weeks out. And we’ll just should see what happens between now and the certification of the election.”
But Crockett also said that election laws are “designed to be final. Any person gets certified, we go on, we govern and we go to the subsequent election.”