About Mark

Mark Ritchie serves as Minnesota's Secretary of State, the state's chief elections officer. In this role, Mark partners with township, city, and county officials to organize elections on behalf of Minnesota's 3.7 million eligible voters.
As a result of his non-partisan leadership of the 2008 U.S. Senate recount, Ritchie was named the 2008 Politician of the Year by Politics in Minnesota, the state's largest non-partisan political news journal.

Mark's other official duties as Secretary of State include administering Safe at Home, Minnesota's address confidentiality program. He also serves on the State's Executive Council, the State Board of Investment, the Minnesota Historical Society and is a member of the Executive Board of the National Association of Secretaries of State.

In the mid-1980s, Mark worked in the administration of Minnesota's Governor Rudy Perpich in the Department of Agriculture, responsible for addressing the economic crisis facing family farmer and rural communities. Mark served for twenty years as the president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), a Minnesota-based public research center working with businesses, churches, farm organizations, and other civic groups to foster long-term economic and environmental sustainability in Greater Minnesota.

In 2003 Mark led National Voice, a national coalition of over two thousand community-based organizations from across the country working together to increase non-partisan civic engagement and voter participation. National Voice, through their "November 2" media campaign, registered over 5 million new voters nationwide, making the effort one of the largest non-partisan voter mobilizations in our nation's history. Over four hundred Minnesota churches, businesses, unions, schools, and community groups participated in the campaign.

Mark and Nancy Gaschott have been married for 30 years and live in Minneapolis.

Their only child, Rachel Gaschott Ritchie, the most outgoing member of their family who made friends everywhere she went, was killed by a drunk driver shortly before her 21st birthday.