Somebody isn’t telling the truth. Somebody named Al Jaeger. (The other problem, of course, is that no one in the news media is asking the right questions, and if no one asks the right questions, Al doesn’t have to provide the right answers. So I decided to do that myself.)
Let me start out by saying that, on the phone at least, young Joshua Voytek sounds like a very nice young man. A little naïve, perhaps, but sincere and friendly and open. (That's him on the right. Looks innocent enough, doesn't he? Doesn't he?). Joshua, you may recall from news stories, editorials in the Bismarck Tribune (good guys, kind of) and Fargo Forum (bad guys, mostly), and my recent blog post, is going to be on the General Election ballot as the Libertarian Party’s candidate for North Dakota Public Service Commission in November. On the General Election ballot even though he does not meet the legal requirements to be there, because he did not get any votes for that office in the North Dakota Primary Election, because his name was not on that ballot, because Secretary of State Al Jaeger lost his paperwork and then, in a panic made up a story and got Attorney Wayne Stenehjem to cover for him and rule that he should be there.
But Jaeger’s story to the newspapers just didn’t sound right. The AP reported that Voytek “was not informed of the oversight” until June 16. Well, I don’t know if those were Jaeger’s words or the AP’s but Jaeger sure wasn’t willing to tell the rest of the story. I didn’t figure Al was going to want to answer my questions, so I called young Joshua. Here’s what he told me.
On April 10, the day after the filing deadline to get on the Primary Election ballot, Joshua and the Libertarian Party State Chairman, Richard Ames, looked over the candidate list, and they noticed Joshua’s name wasn’t on it as a candidate for the Public Service Commission. So Ames called Al Jaeger’s office to inquire. He was told that Joshua had neglected to send in his forms.
Now Joshua was pretty sure he had sent them in. I don’t know if there was a scramble in the Secretary of State’s office to find the forms. I doubt it. But surely THAT was the day to have fixed this problem. But Jaeger, always the stickler for details, always following the letter of the law, just said sorry, no forms, no ballot access. Always the stickler for details, that is, until he discovered that it was his office that had screwed up and LOST the forms. Then the letter of the law went right out the window, and Joshua was granted ballot access in November. Isn‘t it just CONVEEEEENIENT that details and laws can be overlooked when the Secretary of State screws up, but not when, as Al believed, young Joshua screwed up?
None of that, of course, was reported. We were just told that the paperwork was found May 24, and, three weeks later, after the Primary, Al ‘fessed up and announced that Joshua was going to be on the ballot this November. No story that this was discovered as early as April 10.
But wait, there’s more to this story. I had to do a little detective work to track down Joshua, because he’s not in the phone book. So, being a young techie myself, I went to Facebook. Sure enough, there he was. Know what I found? Joshua’s a persistent little cuss.
After he found out that he couldn’t be on the ballot for Public Service Commission, he decided to launch a write-in campaign for another statewide office. Want to guess what office he ran for? Here’s his Facebook post at 12:53 a.m. Tuesday, June 8 (Primary Election Day):
Joshua Voytek wants to remind everyone to vote today in the North Dakota Primary at your local polling places. Remember to write my name in for Secretary of State under the Libertarian column.
Here’s the link to his Facebook page, although I don’t know if you can go there unless you’re a Facebook member. If you can’t, at least you can see Joshua's Facebook profile "photo" up above, and then you'll just have to trust me on the rest. I’m not making any of this up.
Never mind the technicality of electioneering on election day, in violation of state law (although a candidate for Secretary of State probably ought to know the election laws). So, out of frustration with Al Jaeger, perhaps, Joshua ran a write-in campaign against . . . AL JAEGER! But not a very good campaign. He only got 12 votes. Too bad. If he’d gotten 300, he would have been the official candidate of the Libertarian Party for Secretary of State. Gee, I wonder if Al Jaeger would have put him on the ballot for Public Service Commission then.
Two closing thoughts:
1. I didn’t hear a whisper out of Joshua about his Secretary of State’s race once this PSC snafu got public and Jaeger announced he was going to make Joshua the PSC candidate of the Libertarian Party. Surprise. I bet he was kind of hoping no one would remember that he had run for Secretary of State. Joshua, didn’t your parents ever warn you to be careful what you put on Facebook?
2. I also didn’t hear Al Jaeger mention that Joshua ran against him and got 12 votes, even though the way I found out Joshua got 12 votes was by going to the Secretary of State's website, and even though Al Jaeger chaired the subsequent State Canvassing Board meeting which certified Joshua’s 12 votes. Here, take a look at the website, which reflects the official canvass. To see the names of the write–in candidates, just click on the little + sign. Notice that old Al himself even got three write-in votes as the Libertarian candidate.
Finally, as to the question of whether Al ought to go to the pokey for conspiring with Joshua: Probably not. Joshua seemed to accept the fact his paperwork was late and just ran for another office. Joshua is not nearly as devious and unscrupulous as Al, best I can tell. Al won’t go to the pokey. But he should be thrown out of office.
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