Erik van Mechelen
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.
