Mark Ritchie - Secretary of State

Secretary of State

Mark Ritchie was elected Minnesota's Secretary of State in the November 2006 General Election. He was supported by the Secretary of State Project, a progressive organization formed in response to the 2000 presidential election.

In 2008, Ritchie presided over the most publicly scrutinized recount in the history of the United States Senate, the election contest of Al Franken and Norm Coleman. The Minnesota Supreme Court unanimously supported the conclusions of the recount.

Ritchie is also widely credited with increasing the number of overseas military voters in Minnesota elections.

In 2007, Ritchie initially denied knowing how his campaign received a list of e-mail addresses of participants in a state-sponsored program. The list was used to send a citizen an e-mail asking for political contributions. After an investigation by the Legislative Auditor of Minnesota he admitted that he personally transferred the list, which was publicly available, to his campaign. State Republican leaders, citing inconsistencies from him regarding his role in his campaign's procurement of the list, called on him to resign. The Legislative Auditor determined that he had not broken any laws by allowing his campaign to use the e-mail list because it was public data. However, the Auditor did say that he "did not fulfill his legal obligation to make a full and timely response to a request for information from the Legislative Auditor," although he disputed this statement.

In January, 2011, he became the president of the century-old National Association of Secretaries of State, and was formally sworn-in on February 12, 2011. His term, succeeding a predecessor who was defeated in the 2010 midterm elections, ends when the organization holds its summer meeting in West Virginia.