Minnesota is “overdue in a big way” for an overhaul of how its election laws are enforced, according to Kim Crockett, the Republican-endorsed candidate for secretary of state.
“The secretary of state (SOS) supervises the elections in Minnesota,” she explained to Alpha News in a recent in-studio interview. Rather than making the laws, the SOS is in charge of ensuring that the state’s election infrastructure and local officials are “following the state legislature’s direction.” However, she said the current secretary, Steve Simon, is not fulfilling this duty.
“On the election side, I would give the [current] office a D” grade, Crockett said. She’s disappointed that Simon isn’t pushing for what are widely considered “best practices” for elections, including in-person voting and voter ID.
“Western democracies in Europe rejected absentee balloting,” Crockett pointed out, turning away from that system “because of fraud.”
“And by the way, they all use voter identification,” she added.
When asked, she also clarified that her emphasis on election security is not directly in response to anything that did or did not happen during the 2020 election. Rather, she is just doing what is required of any candidate for the SOS office, addressing historic levels of distrust in elections and working to “get that confidence back so that when a party is governing people know that’s what Minnesotans chose.”
Her campaign, she said, “is in reaction to really sloppy statutory law in Minnesota that’s been developing over the years.”
The Heritage Foundation provides an “Election Integrity Scorecard,” ranking the security of each states’ voting procedures. Minnesota ranks 34th on the scale with one being the best. The reasons for this low ranking: a lack of access for election observers, almost no restrictions on same-day registration, few efforts to prevent noncitizen voting and a system by which anybody can vote under any name/address so long as somebody else can attest to their identity. Crockett takes aim at all of these weaknesses in her campaign, saying she respects the foundation’s scorecard and would like to see Minnesota’s ranking improve under her watch.
Kyle Hooten
Kyle Hooten is Managing Editor of Alpha News. His coverage of Minneapolis has been featured on television shows like Tucker Carlson Tonight and in print media outlets like the Wall Street Journal.
