Meet, although he needs no introduction, former activist, community leader and former Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie.
Born in Georgia, Ritchie became intrigued with Minnesota, particularly its food cooperatives, after graduating from Iowa State University in 1971. After moving around, including stints teaching swimming in Alaska and starting food cooperatives in San Francisco, he and his wife landed in South Minneapolis in 1980. They now live in a three-generation household, with another third-generation baby on the way.
Since arriving in Minnesota, he has been extensively involved in the community, including serving as president of both Global Minnesota and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
He is best known for serving as Minnesota’s secretary of state from 2007 to 2015, a tenure that included two recounts: the very close 2008 U.S. Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken (Franken won by 312 votes out of approximately 2.9 million cast, a margin of 0.01%) and the less close 2010 governor’s race between Mark Dayton and Tom Emmer (Dayton won by 8,770 votes out of approximately 2.1 million).
I interviewed Ritchie on Zoom on Aug. 24. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
You were elected secretary of state in 2006 and re-elected in 2010. What does the secretary of state do?
The most visible part is to be the back office for elections, and in that role, occasionally being responsible for things that are more public, like recounts. Elections are about a fourth of the office’s responsibilities. In terms of the work, three-fourths of the office is the place of official registration and official documentation or filings when people create new companies or new nonprofits, or if they want to be a notary public, or they want to get an apostille, and other miscellaneous duties.
Is the secretary of state’s job now more important than ever?
It has always been important. It’s more complicated now because it is electronic and digital, and both things make the job of secretary of state more crucial, more complicated and more core to protecting our democracy.
Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of our democracy?
I am always optimistic about it because I try to spend as much time as possible with younger people, and they’re just so smart, dedicated and courageous. And anyone who lived here during the attempted occupation had to be impressed by the willingness and courage of people to resist authoritarianism.
But equally important, and I might argue more important, was the way that people applied our values about cooperation, caring for each other. All are welcome here. And so when anybody’s children are threatened with kidnapping, when anybody’s children are hungry and anybody’s children need medicine, or when any person needs to be safe and warm and protected, every block in every little hamlet, small town, big town, big city all throughout the entire state reached out and took care of each other.
“Trusting in each other and taking care of each other is what distinguishes us.”
And so that’s the fundamental aspect of democracy. Yes, it’s a system, and you have rules, and how they do democracy in the Netherlands is different than how they do it in the United Kingdom. Minnesota is different than Nevada, for example. But in general, trusting in each other and taking care of each other is what distinguishes us. I am super optimistic about that. One aspect of living in a three-generation household is that you also have 3-year-olds who school you in this matter daily.
What can the electorate do to safeguard democracy?
Well, vote. But there are signs around that say, don’t just vote. And my interpretation of that is the importance of being engaged. We have all kinds of organizations, churches, environmental groups, social organizations, who work to keep the democracy invigorated. Supporting the media, and independent media, the necessity of the fourth estate, is important as well.
There are some specific things that are important about the democracy that Minnesotans hold dear, and I believe other people in other states hold dear. The ability to encourage and make possible the maximum participation by eligible citizens, as opposed to putting every kind of barrier you can dream up so that people cannot vote. These are basic things. Minnesota often is number 1 in terms of participation in the country, and that’s a really great thing.
What was the most rewarding part of being secretary of state and, conversely, what was the most challenging part?
The most rewarding part was learning about the entirety of my state, all 87 counties and all the different homes, the different types of companies, different types of religions and types of recreational activity.
I ran for secretary of state thinking I knew my state. I worked at the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. My passion in life has been around defending family farm agriculture. What I really knew was my neighborhood and the corn and soybean parts of the state. Learning about my state was a gift of getting elected and serving, in that I had reasons, and it was part of my job, to learn the whole state.
“ I developed a bad habit of bragging on the state anywhere I was on the planet.”
I developed a bad habit of bragging on the state anywhere I was on the planet. Every time I learned more about the state, I had more material for bragging up Minnesota. That was fun.
On the downside, I didn’t like being threatened with death when I was in public office. And it is very common, unfortunately, for election officials, but also election judges and people who work in polling places. Violence, shooting, stabbing, ramming with cars, beating up, choking: none of it is OK by me.
Eight years was the time frame for going from paper, in all aspects of business filings, to digital. And anyone who has had to be responsible for, or in some way manage, a very large digitalization process knows the hair pulling and the bad weekends and the many things that go wrong and keep going wrong.
Having that underway throughout my entire eight years was challenging. I had promised my wife, and our family agreement was two terms. On my last day, I was saying, well, we were about 98% digitalized. I would have loved to have been 100% done. But I was very satisfied that I had gone from zero to 98%.
Did you have any parting thoughts when your second term ended?
The good news is that the person who took my place was much younger and digitally savvy. And that makes him a much better secretary of state than I was.
What do you and your family do for fun in South Minneapolis?
Walk the lakes, for sure! We can walk to any place downtown, which is fantastic. My wife was a developer of Open Book, and we are frequent participants in events there.
The whole downtown region, from the baseball and football fields to Open Book and the museums and all of that, is wonderfully walkable. You can walk around the lakes and go to the Bakken Museum, or Sebastian Joe’s.
It’s living day to day in a beautiful place, and it’s also like, oh, somebody has made a new flavor of ice cream that I just think is fantastic. I can keep liking new flavors of ice cream for the next decade, or two or three, and I can walk to and get it from my Sebastian Joe’s. Well, that is the high life, and that’s good enough for me.
What does the future look like for you, and what do you want for Minnesota?
I want our state to feel like one Minnesota and make every neighborhood feel like it’s coherent and that we are there for each other in good times and bad.
I walk some blocks in my neighborhood and see almost all the houses with Minnesota flags, and I think, yeah, they are proud of our state, and so am I. And so that’s an aspect of loving your neighborhood.
I miss the discipline of my secretary of state job that got me around the state automatically, so to speak. But I haven’t stopped pursuing and doing things that get me around the state.
For example, we’re opening a fantastic new veterans and military museum at Camp Ripley to replace the smaller one that’s there. The weekend of Sept. 11 will be the grand opening. In the process, I’ve gotten to know a lot more about that part of our state.
And I’m always realizing that every nook and cranny of the state has amazing things, and that the importance of finding the things that bridge us together in hard times can be accelerated by the experience of seeing other parts of the state, for whatever reason.
Not to be blind to the things that still need improvement or need to be renewed. But it’s just a place that inspires and keeps people going, and I just want to be around to see as much of the responsibility for the future handed over to the younger people, and to get to watch and be marveled by how the next generations will take us where they’ll take us.
There will be climate refugees from other parts of the nation and from other countries. There will also be refugees from authoritarian regimes, as in the past from Germany and Poland and all these places where people came because they were fleeing authoritarian governments.
David Piper writes for the Hill & Lake Press. He lives in Kenwood.
