Minnesota Secretary of State race is about more than just election oversight

The candidate Minnesota voters choose to oversee the state’s 2028 presidential election as Secretary of State will also gain (or retain) influence on two key issues driving voters to the polls this year: social services fraud and the state’s fraught relationship with the Trump administration.

Secretary of State Steve Simon, a DFLer, is seeking another four years on the job. His challengers include Republican Tad Jude, a former state legislator who won his party’s August primary.

Also running are Seth Kuhl-Stennes (Green Party), a representative for the United Food and Commercial Workers and Office of Professional Employees International labor unions, and Chip Tangen (Libertarian Party), who worked as a legislative staffer for the late Rep. Jim Ramstad (R) before leaving the Republican Party. Polling shows neither minor-party candidate gaining traction in the race.

The Minnesota Secretary of State oversees the state’s elections, which are administered at the county or city level, and maintains the statewide voter registration database.

The office also collects, reviews and approves filings for businesses and nonprofit organizations registered in the state; processes notary public applications and maintains a statewide notary database; and oversees Minnesota’s statutory Safe at Home program, which helps victims of domestic abuse, sexual assault, stalking and certain other crimes preserve their anonymity.

Who is Tad Jude?

At age 21, Jude became the youngest person ever elected to the Minnesota Legislature in 1972, the last year candidates ran on nonpartisan ballots. 

“The criticism back then was, everyone agrees on everything and you need a more vigorous debate,” he told MinnPost in an interview this month. “Well, now you have a more vigorous debate.”

The St. Cloud native would go on to serve five terms as a state representative. He left office in 1983 but returned to legislative politics in 1996 for a close but unsuccessful race against DFL Rep. Bill Luther in Minnesota’s now solidly Republican Sixth Congressional District. 

From 2011 to 2021, he served as an elected district court judge in the 10th Judicial District, which spans portions of central Minnesota and the northern Twin Cities exurbs. Jude mounted unsuccessful campaigns for Minnesota Attorney General (in the Republican primary) and Hennepin County Attorney (in the general election) in 2022.

If he wins in November, Jude says he would tighten Minnesota’s voting laws by requiring photo ID to vote; “clean up voter rolls” in partnership with local, state and federal agencies; and ensure only U.S. citizens vote. He’s careful to say he doesn’t want to make voting more difficult, however.

“This is a situation where I think we just need to give people confidence in our election processes,” he said. “We are a very trusting state. We’ve gone by the honors system for a number of years and unfortunately we’ve been taken advantage of.”

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Federal prosecutors charged 10 Minnesota residents with voting illegally earlier this fall. Those cases remain pending, but a recent University of St. Thomas study found that out of 13.4 million votes cast in Minnesota between 2015 and 2024, only three were found by courts to be illegal.

Jude also wants to “prevent fraud in public programs” and put a proposal to bring back the old Minnesota flag – which he calls the “state heritage flag” and which appears on his campaign signage – to a popular vote. 

The Secretary of State has at least two potent levers to pull on the issue of fraud, Jude told MinnPost. One is the office’s role in collecting and overseeing business registrations. 

“Business registration should be more than a filing cabinet. It’s the first opportunity to catch fraud tourism or the abuses we’ve had of government programs,” he said, adding that Minnesota has attracted would-be fraudsters from out-of-state and abroad. As Secretary of State, Jude would establish a “business integrity unit” to hold Minnesota-chartered enterprises accountable and use “network mapping tools” to catch suspicious business registration patterns, he said.

The Secretary of State also sits on the state executive council, along with the four other constitutional officers: governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and legislative auditor. With DFLers in control for the past 12 years, the council hasn’t done much with periodic reports from the legislative auditor flagging shortcomings in executive-branch governance, Jude said. As Secretary of State, Jude said he would push for more vigorous council oversight.

”I don’t think there’s been any difference of viewpoint on the council and it would help to have a state government that is more engaged,” he said.

Who is Steve Simon?

Simon has been Minnesota Secretary of State since 2015, making him the longest-tenured of the state’s five elected constitutional officers. 

From 2005 to 2015, Simon represented parts of the suburban Twin Cities over five terms in the Minnesota House of Representatives. 

During a 2011 legislative hearing, Simon went viral with a rhetorical dig on a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. The proposal failed in a statewide referendum the following year. In 2013, as a member of the House Elections Committee, he sponsored a successful bill to authorize no-excuse absentee voting in Minnesota.

As Secretary of State, Simon has championed and worked to implement state laws to expand voting access, including automatic voter registration, mandatory time off from work to vote and voting privileges for convicted felons who’ve finished their prison sentences. He agreed to a temporary relaxing of mail-ballot witness requirements in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic raged, much to Republicans’ chagrin. A “glitch” in the 2024 rollout of Minnesota’s automatic voter registration system drew further criticism from the right; Simon said afterward that no ineligible voters cast a ballot before the error was caught.

Related: Secretary of State Steve Simon: Minnesota will be ready with ‘war room mentality’ on Election Day

Simon has continued to support state voting rules implemented long before his time. In an interview with MinnPost this summer, he said Minnesota’s half-century-old same-day voter registration law gives late-deciding voters a chance to make their voices heard.

“Some people don’t make up their minds until the day before or morning of [Election Day],” Simon said. “In most states in this country, you can’t register to vote on Halloween – that is too late.”

Ease of voting is a pillar of Simon’s campaign. His website touts Minnesota’s nation-leading voter participation rate in four of the five elections he’s overseen.

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