State and local elections officials in Minnesota are stepping up preparations ahead of the Nov. 3 general election. 

In a live interview Saturday as part of the MinnPost Festival, Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon described the coordination underway with state, local, and community partners to enable “a war room mentality” on Election Day. 

“It would be pretty foolish of us to pretend it couldn’t happen,” Simon said, referring to the possibility that the federal government may attempt to interfere with voting or ballot counting. 

Simon has twice traveled to out-of-state conferences with Attorney General Keith Ellison and other state officials to game out election threat scenarios, Simon said during the interview at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis. 

His office met this month with officials from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and they are also coordinating with media and community groups on strategies to combat misinformation around voting. 

The aim is to “contain” as quickly as possible rumors that could chill voting intent, Simon said.

“You don’t want the contagion of fear, or word on the street, or misinformation or rumor … affecting people’s behavior,” he said. 

Meanwhile, the Secretary of State’s election security navigator team is working directly with local elections administrators in all 87 Minnesota counties to ensure they’re prepared for the big day.

“They literally make house calls to all 87 counties and offer cybersecurity and physical security services,” including IT support and input on polling-place layouts, Simon said.

Related: Across the country, election officials are preparing for the possibility of federal intervention

Simon echoed Bill Ekblad, the team’s head, who said at a press conference last month that his team is also in regular contact with local law enforcement agencies to ensure they’re prepared for any eventuality.

“[We are] communicating up, down and sideways on safety concerns,” Ekblad said. But “we’re not aware of some massive, organized statewide effort to cause problems. We view this as a ‘ready anytime’ approach rather than focusing on a threat stream or singular concern.”

Originally launched to respond to digital threats following the 2016 election, the security navigator program later broadened to cover a range of physical threats “from manmade activity to the worst possible natural disaster,” Ekblad said.

“We started noticing this concern from local election officials … going back really a cycle or two, in the wake of 2020,” he said.

U.S. election workers and officials faced widespread harassment after the 2020 election. Under former President Joe Biden, the U.S. Department of Justice successfully prosecuted cases involving death threats against public officials in Georgia and an election worker in Michigan, two states that helped decide the contest in Biden’s favor.

President Donald Trump’s two-month effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election culminated in a Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his supporters. In the years since, he continued to falsely claim that he won the election. Federal investigators working under current FBI director Kash Patel seized hundreds of 2020 ballots in Georgia earlier this year and appear to be investigating claims of fraud in Michigan and Wisconsin, another swing state.

In social media posts and official acts of government, Trump and his allies continue to criticize voting in swing states and blue states alike. Late last month, federal prosecutors in Minneapolis announced charges against 10 noncitizen Minnesota residents alleged to have voted in recent elections and suggested they were investigating other allegations of voter fraud in Minnesota.

That unsettling fact pattern has Simon and his team preparing for a new election eventuality alongside conventional ones like blizzards, tornadoes, gas leaks and power outages: that the federal government itself will disrupt the proceedings.

“Unfortunately, one item on the hazards list that we’ve never had to plan for before is the possibility that our federal government will do something to interfere with our election,” he said.

Related: On Election Day, polling sites should be ‘islands of calm,’ says Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon

Simon said he’s especially worried about a last-minute disruption that would send state and local officials – and voters – scrambling on Election Day itself. That could take the form of some sort of federal emergency declaration, a voting-related executive order from Trump himself, or a local replay of the FBI’s visit to the Fulton County elections offices earlier this year, he said. 

Another worry: polling place visits by border patrol, immigration or other federal law enforcement agents. It wouldn’t take a mobilization on the scale of Operation Metro Surge to alarm the public, Simon said: “maybe five or 10 polling places [and] word would spread.”

Hence the need for an assertive, real-time communications strategy, he said.

Trump’s rhetoric and action have also fed mistrust of election administration within his voting base. During primary voting on Aug. 11, a group of right-wing influencers visited two Minneapolis polling places and later released a heavily edited video criticizing a state law that allows voters to “vouch” for other voters in certain circumstances. Led by Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe, members of the group dressed in what they called “traditional Muslim” outfits, spoke in fake accents, and approached multiple poll workers during voting hours.

Simon didn’t mention O’Keefe directly on Saturday. He did say, however, that his office has stepped up its training of local election officials and some 30,000 part-time election judges in recent years. That training covers the rules around access and behavior in polling places, as well as conflict resolution tactics on the relatively rare occasions that a visitor causes a ruckus.

“It doesn’t happen often, but we want people to be trained to de-escalate those situations,” he said.

A Minnesota law passed in response to election worker threats and harassment makes it illegal to intimidate or “dox” election workers, impede access to polling places to otherwise interfere with election administration, tamper with voting equipment or ballot boxes, and access or tamper with voter lists or the state’s digital voter registration system without authorization.

State law also prohibits “unlawful interference” with the voting process and strictly limits access to polling places during voting hours, according to a fact sheet from Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office. 

Those access restrictions apply both to local law enforcement and federal officials, except those granted entry by an authorized elections official. They also apply to “private armed forces,” which are illegal in Minnesota anyway, Ellison’s office says.

At the press conference last month, Simon sought to distinguish the risk of outright federal interference in voting with what he said was a long-standing practice of observers from the U.S. Department of Justice visiting polling places on Election Day. These routine visits are typically coordinated with state officials in advance and are not cause for concern in and of themselves, Simon said, adding that DOJ observers made the rounds largely without incident during the Aug. 11 primary vote. 

Related: Project Veritas founder dresses in ‘traditional Muslim attire’ in video attacking Minnesota election law

On Saturday, he suggested those coordinated observer visits might be the extent of the cooperation the state gets from the Trump administration this year. In a stark departure from past election cycles – including during Trump’s first term – the federal government is not coordinating with Minnesota on election security this year, Simon said. 

“In the first Trump administration, they were excellent partners on this issue,” Simon said. “I would give them an A grade. Sadly, they are just not a partner October 12, 2026.”

The expectation is that “if there is truly a national security emergency,” the U.S. Department of Homeland Security would keep Minnesota in the loop, Simon added. But federal law enforcement agencies no longer hold secure intelligence briefings with state officials, as they have in past election cycles. The invitation-only “tabletop exercises” – dress rehearsals for various election disruption scenarios – are gone too, Simon said.

“We’ve moved on. We’ve filled those spaces and filled those voids, but that is one difference for sure,” he said.

The preparations come with absentee voting well underway, early voting set to start on Friday and Election Day itself just over three weeks away. The hope is that they all look unnecessary on Nov. 4.

“Victory to me would look like we do a lot of planning for a lot of stuff and it never happens,” Simon said.

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