By Dave Baumeister
County Correspondent
SIOUX FALLS – During a report on “ballot discrepancies” from the 2020 election,” Minnehaha County Commissioner Joe Kippley asked county auditor Leah Anderson for her resignation at the Sept. 19 meeting.
At a meeting in June, when Anderson went over the 2024 primary results with the commission, she brought up that 24,500 votes were missing from the previous General Election in 2020.
Although Anderson offered no proof of her findings, prior to that meeting she sent out a press release that made the same claim.
Even though she told the commission that her findings were in their infancy, and she had not done a full analysis, she still went on to repeat her “statistics” on at least one Internet podcast.
But when she spoke to the commission in June, Anderson said she would continue her analysis and report her findings back to them.
However, until the Sept. 10 meeting, those findings were never reported.
On Sept. 3, Kippley asked that an agenda item be added to the following meeting for the auditor to report those findings.
During her report, Anderson explained that she never said any ballots were “lost,” as local media sources claimed, but only that there were “discrepancies.”
As these “discrepancies” surrounded something that could not be found, “lost” would have been an understandable synonym for the problem.
But as Anderson reported, as far as she could tell, without being able to open the 2020 ballots, the votes were accounted for.
At least enough where Anderson said she “felt comfortable with the number of ballots cast.”
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And with that information, and referring to Anderson’s press release and podcast being made before an analysis of any errant vote tallies was complete, Kippley asked her if she had any regrets about putting out premature findings and going on podcasts before she had figured all the facts.
In response, Anderson doubled down and said, “No. The ‘discrepancy’ was still there.”
However, she continued with a statement that seemed to contradict her negative response: “I needed to understand the ways elections are put together. I needed to understand records under my watch…
“It is my job as auditor to understand information thoroughly and be transparent with it.”
Kippley’s take was that she was trying to be “transparent” before she understood the information thoroughly.
“This election coming up is very important,” Kippley said to Anderson, “and we need an auditor with credibility at this point.
“You are the ‘auditor who cried wolf,’ so you have no credibility, and I, as one commissioner, would ask you to resign.”
At this, there were audible gasps, and Anderson smiled and said, “I am not going to resign, Mr. Kippley.”
Toward the end of the meeting, Kippley clarified his position and gave a warning.
“When you get elected to an office, you make choices, and you take actions – and you need to be held accountable for those actions.
“So when we have an auditor who just burns her credibility to get on some online shows and some 15 minutes of fame, I just don’t know if I can trust what’s going to happen in November.
“Basically, this auditor is a walking lawsuit…so if she is not going to resign, we need to be prepared for litigation against the county.”
Later, Kippley added this analogy to explain what he felt was irresponsibility: “If, out of a $140 million budget, the treasurer or auditor was to send out a press release that ‘half of that money was missing,’ and later found that it wasn’t missing, but they overlooked another bank account, and just hadn’t found it yet.
“Whoever sent out the release should have to take some responsibility for that.”
And he felt when responsibility is not being taken, that could hurt the county in the long run.
There will be no county commission meeting on Sept. 17, and the meeting will be at 9 a.m., Tuesday, Sept. 24, in the third-floor meeting room of the Minnehaha County Administration Building at 6th and Minnesota in Sioux Falls.
