Simon, the Architect
FICTION
Steve’s mind raced. Tomorrow, November 5, 2024, millions of Minnesotans would vote, and every reform he’d fought for—every bill he’d authored back in the House, every tweak he’d pushed since 2015 once he’d become the Secretary—was about to be tested. No-excuse absentee voting, automatic voter registration, the permanent mail-out absentee list—these weren’t just policies; they were his legacy. These changes had turned Minnesota into a turnout juggernaut and absentee ballot leader, the envy of every state. Internet-connected electronics nicely centralized data throughout the 46-day early voting period while ‘paper ballots’ was the talking point to give many the illusion of security and auditability, even though it was no secret that computers counted scanned pictures of ballots.
Steve had always been confident and measured, innate traits that were honed in the Attorney General’s Office, then as a 10-year legislator, now as a third-term Secretary, but today, staring down the barrel of another national election, he couldn’t shake the unease gnawing at him. His job had been to build a system to last, to keep power where it belonged, with those who knew how to weild it or were very open to influence. So far it was working, consolidating seats within known quantities and limiting outsiders. The Uniparty, as the cynics called it, was strong, for now.
As Steve prepared his notes for the press conference to come, his heart-rate lowered as he reflected fondly on the recent years of designing and building. After the manufactured “wrongly-rejected” Franken-Coleman crisis of 2008, back in 2010, Steve chief-authored the absentee ballot boards into existence. This was a major change which led to a larger proportion of absentee ballots. The data which trickled in during the early voting period allowed for preparations to be made, a natural buffer against the chaos of election day itself.
Next, 2013 legislation initiated the Electronic Poll Pad Task Force, of which he was a part, piloting the KNOWiNK iPads in five cities across three counties. The work concluded with draft legislation which led to an almost flawless Hennepin County rollout in 2016, with only one municipality opting out. Two years later, more than fifty counties used them. By 2024, modem-enabled electronic tabulators had been mandated and hand counts heavily discouraged. Same-day registrations through the iPads, along with their real-time monitoring and modification, augmented the absentee ballot contingency strategy. KNOWiNK’s TotalVote software included a nifty voter creation and modification algorithm enabled by data flowing in and out of yet more third-party services about which even Steve himself had trouble keeping straight in his mind—his job had simply been to sign the certification document… sometimes it was easier not knowing every detail to devote more energy to the big-picture mission.
This wasn’t about stealing anything; it was about fortifying Democracy—his work had gotten him on the cover of Time Magazine in October 2022, as a Defender. Indeed, while open forum citizens complained about rigged outcomes and lack of audits, for Steve, it was about winning the game fair and square, with rules he’d written himself and spread across the country as President of the National Association of Secretaries of State. Once something was in the election code, it tended to be resilient to change, with one exception: Simon’s office’s ideas were often taken up right away—“Simon says,” his friend Max Hailperin, appointed by Governor Dayton to the 2013 Poll Pad Task Force, had said more than once in their late nights drafting landscape-changing bills together. Doing so had almost been too easy prior to 2020, but since the LaRose v. Simon and NAACP v. Simon approach (circumventing the Legislature) to waiving absentee witness signatures and extending receiving deadlines (and the many issues that emerged in the aftermath of November 3rd), elevated scrutiny of proposed legislation had forced the Minnesota election code ghostwriters to up their game.
Case in point, in 2025, one bill, HF2117, included a tricky little bit of wording hiding in Section 38 of the omnibus—cleverly chief-authored by a Republican (but written by Simon’s own people) and smoothly titled “The Election Integrity Act”—where starting in 2026 the Secretary’s rules would have to become law if they were not already codified. That was one new way of dealing with the question of whether electronic poll pads were mandatory or not; the felony tactic in the Oak Grove situation had ended up having shorter legs than the cast-vote-records-don’t-exist ploy in 2022.
Steve sighed, the 2013 Task Force’s discussions of this very question echoing through his mind. Where would we be now if we’d just mandated them from the outset? Then the KNOWiNK tools disguised as “rosters” might already be in every precinct. Few legislators paid attention to what they were voting on while many voters overlooked the beauty of the system. But those that were noticing had become a problem. Even commissioners were starting to listen to them. A man who thinks is dangerous. A man who thinks deeply, doubly so.
And now, back to our common shared reality…
It was just reported by ‘meddling kid’ Patrick Colbeck that Michigan’s SOS Jocelyn Benson uses 2 sets of books for elections.
With great questions from mathematician Draza Smith on same aiming to discover the actual techniques and methods used.
Fiction? NOT really... True Crime!!
Well written!