Duane submitted this Letter to the Editor of the Pioneer Press after they published an editorial by Secretary of State Steve Simon.
Secretary of State Steve Simon’s recent “Minnesota’s election system is the envy of the nation” article confirms some serious concerns about how he carries out his duty to protect Minnesota elections from ineligible voting. He seems unwilling to listen, to analyze, and to respect the intelligence of citizens. The Secretary’s opinion piece is in response to being confronted with a range of troubling data derived from official election sources. Any Secretary of State who takes the validity of our elections seriously would (1) investigate the data, (2) identify problems, (3) make necessary corrections, and (4) prepare a detailed report assuring the public that he understands and is on top of the details of the election system. Instead of taking those steps, Mr. Simon hauls out a stream of political cover stories that address none of the questions raised by the data. He dodges responsibility by claiming that ineligible voting requires there to be “a large conspiracy,” and assures us there can’t be any significant wrongdoing because he is “confident in the integrity of Minnesotans.” Most egregious is his statement that it is “nearly impossible to be a cheat” which he immediately proceeds to prove untrue, citing how easy it is to cheat: Voters are taken at their word that they are eligible. With that wave of the hand, he ignores the data indicating that thousands of voters may not live where they said they do, may not have the Social Security Numbers they listed, may not have completed their felony sentences, and may have voted twice in the same election. Note that Mr. Simon disputes not one iota of the data itself. He would have us believe, without any examination by him, that not one of those indicated individuals voted while ineligible. There is a critical fact about our election system that the Secretary does not mention: The hundreds of thousands of individuals who register on election-day have their votes counted before they are checked for legal status, citizenship, and identity. And, as the Secretary admits, after many of those voters fail an eligibility test, nothing is done about the ballot already cast. On April 11, 2018, Secretary Simon and the Director of Elections, Mr. Gary Poser, appeared before the Government Operations and Elections Policy Committee of the Minnesota House of Representatives which I serve on. I asked them about the data from the Social Security Administration (SSA) showing that more than 16,000 persons who registered to vote during 2016 and who supplied a partial Social Security Number could not be found in the SSA database. Both Mr. Simon and Mr. Poser claimed ignorance of the data but assured me they would look into it and get back to the committee. Having heard nothing for almost three months, on July 3, 2018, I sent Mr. Poser a request for a detailed report on the SSA data and how each individual’s record was processed. The legislature needs to hear from Mr. Poser so it can make changes, if indicated, to the law. The public needs to hear more than platitudes from Mr. Simon so that it can be confident in the results of close elections.