Once again the tl;dr is to vote for the incumbent. On the ballot:

Diane B. Bratvold (incumbent)
Jonathan R. Woolsey

So first of all, if early voting has started and your website still says “coming soon,” you are not a serious candidate. But I fell down the google rabbit hole here so you’re all going to hear my story of what I found.

When I looked up Jonathan R. Woolsey, what I found were a whole lot of court cases (and appeals going all the way up to the State Supreme Court) involving a divorce with a child custody case. Woolsey divorced his wife in 2014, when his daughter was an infant. There’s no way to directly link to the stuff in the Minnesota Court Records Online system but I dug through the divorce filings and found that by the fall of 2014, his ex had an order for protection against him and exchanges of their daughter happened at the police department. The OFP presumably ended at some point but he appears to have repeatedly over the last decade filed endless requests to modify one thing or another, dragging his ex back into court over and over. The most recent court decision from this year included things like “[Jonathan Woolsey]’s request to have his daughter communicate with him by text is denied, as she does not own a cell phone” and “Halloween to be removed from the holiday schedule.”

I have known quite a few women who shared custody with a dude who dragged them back into court over petty bullshit, bleeding them of time, money, and energy, extending their abuse and control and forcing the woman to give them attention (by way of showing up in court).

Is that what’s going on here? Maybe not, but the fact that his ex not only got an Order for Protection but was able to have it extended at least once sure makes it look like that pattern. Anyway, in 2020 there was a case that made it all the way up to the State Supreme Court. The State Court of Appeals panel ruled against him, and I checked — yep, Diane Bratvold appears to have been one of the lawyers who ruled. So my guess is that’s why he’s running against her.

Vote for Diane Bratvold!

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I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people to donate to fundraisers I can then see fund. Usually I do teacher fundraisers (and I found one for this year, Ms. Pierce at Lucy Craft Laney school in North Minneapolis who would like donations to buy snacks for her students and supplies like Lysol wipes — stuff that schools with wealthier families just have the parents send in).

But I’m also fundraising for something slightly more personal to my family this year: YMCA Camp Northern Lights. Camp Northern Lights is a family camp, which is a camp that whole families attend together. My family went to Camp Du Nord (the other YMCA family camp) for many years, and my daughter Kiera has worked as a counselor at Camp Northern Lights for the last two summers. One of the things that makes Camp Northern Lights unique is their serious commitment to inclusion of families from communities that have been underrepresented at YMCA camps.

Last summer, Camp Northern Lights had a serious fire early in the summer — no one was hurt, but they lost their commercial kitchen and the housing for the counselors-in-training. They are hoping to raise enough money to rebuild an expanded kitchen. I have set up a fundraiser towards that goal. If you’d like to express your appreciation for the usefulness of this blog, you can show your love by donating to my fundraiser! (9/23 note: the images aren’t loading on their pages — any of them, as far as I can tell, it’s not just me — but the fundraiser still works.)