Welcome to Capitol Watch 2025 Happy New Year and welcome to Capitol Watch 2025! Hold onto your wallets because the Minnesota Legislature returns to St. Paul on Tuesday, January 14,…
The Republican Party of Minnesota filed suit yesterday (Saturday) contesting the timing of the special election scheduled for January 28 for House District 40B (Roseville area). A press conference is…
As expected, Republican Aaron Paul, the challenger in the House 54A (Shakopee-area) election last month, filed a court challenge to the published result. Officially, the Democratic incumbent state Rep. Brad…
Election Day was Tuesday, November 5, 2024. At least that’s what we used to call it. Now it’s just a day where Minnesota begins the process of collecting and counting…
I guess we’ll find out for sure once the new legislature convenes in January. In the meantime, we search for signs and portents. As for trends, I’ve been pointing to…
We wrote last week about Hennepin County ignoring the list of election judges submitted by the political parties in the creation of their ballot board. Today, the Minnesota Supreme Court…
In an ongoing dispute over the composition of ballot boards, Hennepin County claimed they “exhausted” the list of election judges put forward by the Republican Party because they forwarded the…
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon has a problem. Too many Minnesotans don’t trust the election system he manages. According to the latest Thinking Minnesota Poll, nearly one in four…
Breitbart reported on a disturbing event that occurred in Minnesota recently. The Republican National Committee (RNC) sent a letter Monday to Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon. The letter can…
More than one in four Minnesotans voting in the 2022 election cast an absentee ballot. The genie’s out of the bottle post pandemic, setting the stage for the number of…
With the May 20 adjournment date in sight, it looked like the 2024 legislative session was going to end on time, on budget and with very little drama. But this…
There used to be a longstanding tradition of election policy bills requiring bipartisan support in order to pass. Because election law by definition is so fraught with partisan politics, it…
Democrats like Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon loudly proclaim their support of democracy, but their actions reveal a desire to enforce single-party rule through speech controls and election interference.…
The DFL sold the state’s politics to out- of-state interests — and it was a fire sale.
It turns out two wrongs do make a right for illegal aliens getting driver’s licenses in Minnesota. Thanks to Gov. Tim Walz and the DFL legislature, illegal aliens in Minnesota…
There isn’t space in the newsletter to write about all the bad things that passed this week, so here are just ten things that happened this week in St. Paul…
Picking up where we left off in Part 4 of our Minnesota For Sale series on campaign finance, we dig up more names and money in the shadowy world of…
In this fourth edition of our Minnesota For Sale series, we dive into the dark money supporting Democratic candidates in Minnesota. Democrats in Minnesota and elsewhere are famously opposed to…
It’s surprisingly cheap to purchase the politics of a mid-sized state in flyover country. Now that all the campaign finance reports are in for 2022, we can add up the…
A bill to impose ranked-choice voting (RCV) on state and federal elections cleared two more hurdles at the state Capitol yesterday. The bill (HF 2486) is moving forward despite (or…
In one of the most blatant (and profitable) pay-to-play arrangements in state history, Democrats in Minnesota are about to provide a huge return-on-investment to Minnesota’s American Indian tribes for their…
There is a tradition in the Minnesota legislature that bills dealing with election law achieve bi-partisan support. Governors Tim Pawlenty and Mark Dayton each abided by this tradition and refused…
Nearly two years after the 2020 election, concern over the integrity of the electoral process still runs deep in Crow Wing County. A core group of skeptics often attends county…
While the debate over voter fraud and the “big lie” continues across the country, a relatively minor bill moved through a Senate committee this week that could do more to…