Minnesota Secretary of State addresses suspicious mail, election security

Weeks from tomorrow is the midterm election, in case you haven't noticed with all the advertisements that you're seeing. Early voting underway is always, of course, there's concerns about election security, polling locations, etc. And the threats of potential violence here, including some envelopes mailed to offices across the country last week. To talk about all of these topics, let's bring in Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon. Microphone. Steve, can you hear me now? Okay, now we're back. Now I can hear you. Okay, well, apparently I got a microphone issue going on here. I apologize for that. Okay. Yeah. So I'm gonna pin this one on. So a lot to talk about here, including this morning. You did an event this morning with Mayor Jacob Frye in Minneapolis and a few others talking about early voting sites, the pop-up voting sites that are now open. Why is this such an important topic to highlight in terms of voter turnout? There's so much emphasis on this. Kind of explain this approach. Yeah, I think my mission is just to make sure that Minnesotans know that they've got options. There are basically three items on the voting menu in terms of methods for voting. One, of course, the most popular still is voting in person on election day, of course. That's how I like to vote. A lot of people like to vote that way. But there are two others. And Minneapolis was highlighting one of those today, namely voting in person now before election day. We are in the zone right now of early voting. Minneapolis is doing this pop-up situation. Anyone around the state could do that as well, where they have temporary polling locations that are there just for a little bit, not every day, but some days. And that's one way to vote. And then the third way to vote is from home, of course, by mail, where you can vote from your kitchen table, you can vote from your couch, whatever. I do urge people who have questions about any of methods of voting and where to go if they want to vote early in person to go to our website, which is mnvotes.gov. If you go to mnvotes.gov, you can just type in your address, find out where that place is for you. And for that matter, you can find out where your game day, election day, November 3rd polling place is as well. Yeah, and you've highlighted this many times that Minnesota really is a national leader in voter turnout. How much of a difference do you see in that turnout by emphasizing the early voting locations like this? I think a lot, as you say, for most of the last 50 years, Minnesota has been number one in the country, most elections when it comes to voter turnout. I don't think that's an accident. And one of the things that contributes to it is we give people other options. And I think increasingly, people are looking for that. Again, I love to vote on election day, most people still do. But for some people, that just isn't the most convenient anymore. They don't wanna necessarily and always vote on a given day during given hours at a given physical location. Most still do, but some don't. And so we offer that in Minnesota. So I do think that contributes particularly over the last decade or so to people showing up as their lives and schedules evolve. I think people appreciate being met halfway by ways that make it more convenient for them to vote. Well, let's talk about election security, a topic that's been touched on many times. it again this morning. I mean, there's a couple different elements to that. One is ensuring people that the ballots themselves are secured and the other is ensuring that polling places themselves are free from interference. I mean, what's the number one concern for you? To me, it's just about making sure that everyone's freedom to vote is uninterrupted, whether that is in terms of ballot integrity, whether that is in terms of physical security. I feel really good for a number of reasons. First, we've got really good laws in Minnesota on those subjects. Really good because they're really clear and precise. They don't leave much wiggle room to interpret. And that's a good thing, I think, in this area. The second thing is we've got really good partners up, down, and sideways, whether it's law enforcement, counties, cities, even nonprofit organizations that shine a light on these processes. So I don't want to jinx anything. Nothing's a certainty. But we've really spent a lot of time over the last few months gaming out various scenarios. Not predicting that those things will happen necessarily, but gaming out scenarios that could impede people's freedom to vote. That could cause a breach of some kind in security or ballot integrity and I feel very good about where we are 15 days out. Well, in discussing ballot integrity, obviously concerns about, you've seen accusations recent elections about ballots gone missing or fake ballots being put into the system. Explain to us how you respond to those, whether it's conspiracy theory or whatever you wanna call it. I mean, you can't just print out a ballot and dump it in, but also you're very conscious about once those ballots go into the tabulation machine that they're protected. Yeah, we really do. This goes back decades, by the way. We have really good, solid, precise checks and balances in the system before, during, and after the elections. And just to take the hypothetical that you mentioned, this idea of flooding ballots, that really can't happen. I mean, you look at the polling places. We have party balanced election judges. So everyone's watching each other. We use paper ballots. Remember, so no one's punching numbers on a screen. It's the ultimate kind of safe harbor. Right. Low tech beats high tech in this situation. So we've got paper ballots. There's an audit trail. You can touch them, feel them, see them under federal law. You've got to keep those ballots under lock and key for almost two years. and so this idea of introducing new ballots that someone can just sort of dump a bunch of physical ballots that's something that would immediately be caught and remember our election system is really spread out it's really decentralized by design i like that so our office we don't count any votes ever we don't touch anyone's ballot on election day as many of your viewers know that's totally spread out there are literally thousands of polling places across Minnesota and the counties and cities and towns help them and it's your friends and neighbors the poll workers who are doing the vast majority of the counting. And so this is totally spread out. There's not one pinch point. There's not one pressure point. So that decentralization really helps. So on election night, when you see on our website, again, mnvotes.gov, a lot of people go to our website on election night and we're reporting results, but we're just reporting what others report to us. We're not doing any accounting in our office. We're getting them from counties and cities all over the state and we're reporting that stuff and they're always reported if you'll notice as unofficial results that's because we got to see the receipts so we'll report what's reported to us on election night but it's always subject to after the fact verification all 87 counties have to canvas the results which means they make sure the math lines up and then after that we have a statewide canvassing of the results as well and even after that we're never the last word. I mean, if any citizen out there gets wind of something that went wrong, whether it's a tabulation error or outright fraud or whatever, the courthouse doors are always open. So we are never the last word. If someone has evidence or a witness or anything, state court, federal court, that's the last word. So there are multiple options for people to check the work and to attack a result if they've got evidence. Now, vibes and whims and gut feelings aren't enough. you gotta have actual evidence. But if you have that, there's always the option for someone to question and attack an outcome or a result, and that's okay. So we've got multiple stops in the process where there's an opportunity to check the validity, the accuracy of the actual election results. Last Friday, you revealed that your office was among many that received what's described as a suspicious mailing, including a threatening letter and an unidentified white powder. The FBI said they and the US Postal Inspection Service are investigating these. Have you heard any results of what that white powder may have been? I don't think we've received the formal result yet, but every other place has been tested. It was not poisonous, it was not harmful. And keep in mind, we were one of several states that got the same kind of letter. Thankfully, it was intercepted before it actually got to our physical office. So kudos to the folks in the Minnesota Department of Administration and the US Postal Inspection Service. They were totally on the spot, they got it, they tracked it down, which is great. And by the way, this isn't a partisan political thing. People elected Democrats, elected Republicans all across the board who got this letter. I saw that, yeah, like US Senator Ted Cruz, his office government too, so yeah. Right, my friend and colleague, the Louisiana secretary of state you know different political party but she was one of the first her office actually did get it and i think they might have had to evacuate their office we had something like this two years ago where it did come to our office and we did have to evacuate that day um that didn't happen this time but look uh we're not going to be deterred obviously when i say we i mean our office won't be but more importantly i don't think minnesota voters are going to be deterred by that we don't know yet anything about who may have sent it seems like it's probably the same person or people who sent it to all these offices. And maybe it's just attention seeking. Maybe there's some political message behind it. We don't know. Can you tell us the nature of the threat? I mean, what they were trying to achieve? We don't know. We've asked the FBI and the Postal Inspection Service that too. They're not yet ready to tell us. But I assume at some point, I hope that they'll track down whoever did this and they'll have more to say about that. Okay. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, thanks for the time today. Appreciate it. with two weeks ago, busy time for you. So we thank you for the time. Thank you for your interest. I just hope everyone makes a plan to vote. mnvotes.gov is the website. You can go there and find a bunch of information. All right. All right. Thanks so much.