Chelsey Perkins/Brainerd Dispatch via Creative Commons
A crowd gathers during a October 26, 2021, Crow Wing County Board meeting to discuss relitigating the 2020 election.
It’s 2022, and a new election season is upon us. There are the national midterm elections, with some analysts predicting that Republicans will take back both the House and Senate, as well as the usual slate of local contests.
So far, in Minnesota, things are off to a jarring start. In the case of rural Crow Wing County, it’s almost as though the 2020 election never ended.
The county sits in the middle of Minnesota, just north of Little Falls, where aviator Charles Lindbergh was born in 1902, and it’s where local residents recently lobbied county commissioners to relitigate the 2020 election.
Local officials everywhere will need to accept that “there is a movement going on in the country that we have to get prepared for,” logic and audits be damned.
It worked. On January 4, Crow Wing County commissioners voted 4-1 to request a forensic audit of the 2020 election (including both presidential and state contests), even though there wasn’t a close contest to be found anywhere on the ballot, with Republicans winning every matchup.
But that, of course, is beside the point.
In October 2021, a group of concerned residents attended a Crow Wing County board meeting en masse to express their doubts over the validity of the previous year’s election. Local coverage of the meeting from the Brainerd Dispatch noted that Republican candidates, including Presidential contender Donald Trump, “earned the majority in every partisan race the county’s voters contemplated.”
Why did it take nearly a year for this group to get organized and demand a review of the past election, even though every Republican on the ballot won every seat they were vying for?
Brainerd Dispatch reporter Chelsey M. Perkins found clues in the testimony given by those who showed up in October to demand an investigation into the county’s electoral results. The protesters voiced a laundry list of “voter fraud claims amplified by Trump and his allies before, during, and after the 2020 election,” Perkins wrote, including widely debunked conspiracy theories put forth by Douglas Frank, who is closely linked to MyPillow CEO and devoted Trump supporter Mike Lindell.
Lindell, who is based in Minnesota, is currently being sued for defamation by voting machine company Smartmatic for drumming up conspiracy theories about the 2020 election as a marketing scheme for his pillow company. He and Frank, his compatriot, have also been named in a defamation lawsuit by the voting machine manufacturer Dominion for disparaging the company’s work after the last presidential election.
But these lawsuits haven’t slowed down Lindell or Frank one bit. Lindell has reportedly spent $25 million of his own money on promoting election fraud claims, while Frank has apparently carved out a lucrative niche for himself as a purveyor of the same bogus claims. Just days ago, according to CNN, he wowed a room of fellow conspiracy theorists in Texas, earning a standing ovation after sharing his views on how the 2020 election was “stolen.”
This may be little more than an expensive marketing scheme or a vainglorious exercise for Lindell and Frank, but, as CNN reporters Sara Murray and Jeff Simon point out, their actions have also helped the “Big Lie” regarding voting fraud metastasize as the nation moves into the 2022 election season.
This is part of what led the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance to declare the United States a “backsliding democracy” in November 2021, and it’s playing out now in Crow Wing County.
In the past few months, the five member board of commissioners has faced a newly stoked crowd of disbelievers.
One commissioner, Bill Brekken, told the Brainerd Dispatch in early January that he voted to allow an audit of the 2020 election to move forward, should the Minnesota secretary of state deem it necessary, because he felt it would prove that Crow Wing County has in fact done everything by the book. (Minnesota’s Secretary of State, Democrat Steve Simon, recently said there is “no reason to second-guess” the county’s handling of the 2020 election.)
Still, Brekken warned that allowing this process to go forward, even if the audit were to definitively show that no voting fraud took place, would likely do little to stop the flood of misinformation that has taken hold in his county and beyond.
Thanks to events such as the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Brekken said, local officials everywhere will need to accept that “there is a movement going on in the country that we have to get prepared for,” logic and audits be damned.
Brekken and others on the commission will have as hard a time doing away with the fraudulent claims brought before them by citizens caught in a web of misinformation as the rest of us will have in trying to stop the United States from backsliding even further away from its democratic ideals.