Adam Schwarze says he was nearly 2,000 miles from Minnesota on Election Day 2012, enduring Navy SEAL training on a mountain in Southern California. Minnesota state records say he voted in person.
Both things cannot be true. And the Republican Senate candidate wants to know why the state has shown no interest in finding out which one is wrong.
Schwarze, a Navy veteran now running for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota, discovered the discrepancy only recently, after a reporter fact-checked his claim that he had only ever voted for President Donald Trump. When Schwarze pulled up his own voting history on the Minnesota Department of State's website, the records showed an in-person vote cast under his name during the November 2012 presidential election, Fox News Digital reported. The records do not indicate who that ballot was cast for.
The problem, Schwarze says, is straightforward: he wasn't in Minnesota. He wasn't anywhere near it.
Fox News Digital reviewed a copy of Schwarze's military orders, which show a BUD/S report date of June 12 at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado in California. The Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL course runs roughly six months, placing graduation in approximately December 2012, well after the November election.
Schwarze commissioned as a Navy officer in May 2012 and reported to Coronado the following month. On Election Day, he told Fox News Digital, he was on a mountain in Mount Laguna, California, part of the grueling training regimen that kept every candidate in his class far from a polling place.
"All the instructors, the morning after the election, we woke up, Obama won the election, and they said, 'Who didn't do their absentee voting?' And of course it was like a gotcha, none of the SEAL candidates had gone to do their absentee voting. We were all in SEAL training, right? So, they beat the snot out of us for three hours."
Schwarze said he paid a physical price for not voting, and now he's paying a different kind of price for a vote he says he never cast.
"It was physically impossible for that [vote] to occur."
The state records raise a second red flag. An unknown person registered Schwarze to vote on the day of the 2009 Minneapolis mayoral election, the city's first contest using ranked choice voting. His registration became active the following day. Schwarze has not explained who registered him, and the records offer no answer.
When Fox News Digital asked Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon's office for clarification, a spokesperson responded not with any explanation of the Schwarze records but with a boilerplate defense of the state's election apparatus.
"Minnesota's election system is governed by extensive state and federal laws to ensure it is honest, secure, and accurate."
The spokesperson added that Minnesotans "fundamentally trust our election system, which is why we are consistently number one in voter turnout," and cited a 2026 ranking by the Election Data and Science Lab at MIT that placed Minnesota first on the Election Performance Index.
Simon's office did not address how someone appears to have voted under Schwarze's name while he was in California, or whether any investigation has been opened.
The Secretary of State's own website carries the tagline: "Minnesota elections are the envy of the nation." It boasts of "robust security measures" and "the transparency that's an essential part of maintaining trust in the system."
Schwarze says he has asked state officials for more information. Those requests, he says, have gone unfulfilled.
Fox News Digital also reached out to Governor Tim Walz, Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, and Keith Ellison. No responses from any of the three were reported.
Minnesota does not require identification to vote. Schwarze pointed to that fact as the mechanism that would have made it easy for someone to cast a ballot under his name without detection.
His proposed fix is direct: same-day, in-person voting with paper ballots and voter ID.
"So, let's solve the problem. Let's open up the voting log: Steve Simon, Tim Walz, Peggy Flanagan, Keith Ellison. Let's have same-day voting in person with paper... with an ID; the American citizens want that as well. That's my plea."
The plea is unlikely to find a warm reception from the officials he named. Minnesota Democrats have long resisted voter ID requirements, framing them as barriers to participation. But Schwarze's case puts that resistance in an uncomfortable light: a man who was verifiably out of state, with military orders to prove it, appears in the records as having voted in person. If the system's "robust security measures" cannot catch or explain that, what exactly are they measuring?
Schwarze's voter fraud allegation lands in a Minnesota political environment already roiled by scandal. The Walz-Flanagan administration has faced sustained criticism over a massive Medicaid fraud scheme that prosecutors say involved nearly 100 defendants, with 64 convictions secured so far and the Department of Justice conducting an expansive investigation, the Washington Examiner reported. Internal polling by the National Republican Senatorial Committee found that 55 percent of likely voters hold the Walz-Flanagan administration responsible for the misuse of funds.
Republicans see the fraud scandal as a rare opening in a state that has been reliably Democratic in federal elections. NRSC regional press secretary Nick Puglia framed the stakes bluntly: "The seriously retired Governor Tim Walz and Minnesota Democrats like Peggy Flanagan and Angie Craig oversaw massive fraud that has hurt Minnesotans, and their failed leadership puts Minnesota in play for Republicans in 2026."
Schwarze has been connecting the dots between financial fraud and election integrity on the campaign trail for months. In a January appearance on Breitbart News Saturday, he alleged that billions in federal tax dollars were stolen under the Walz and Flanagan administration, telling listeners, "Those billions of dollars are your listeners' money, their federal tax dollars that were being stolen by the Walz and Flanagan administration."
His voter fraud discovery now gives that argument a personal dimension.
"The fraud of your tax dollars is not happening in a vacuum. It's connected to other forms of fraud, like election integrity."
Schwarze spoke at the Minnesota Republican state convention in Duluth on May 29, where the Senate race is taking shape. He faces a competitive primary field. Former NFL sideline reporter Michele Tafoya has also launched a Republican campaign for the seat being vacated by retiring Democratic Sen. Tina Smith, AP News reported. Tafoya has secured an endorsement from Sen. Tim Scott, chairman of the NRSC, though she carries potential vulnerabilities from past support for Marco Rubio over Trump in 2016 and her support for abortion rights with some exceptions.
What remains missing from this story is any sign that the state of Minnesota intends to investigate. No law enforcement agency or election authority has announced a formal inquiry into the vote cast under Schwarze's name. No official has explained how someone was registered to vote under his name in 2009 without his knowledge. No one has accounted for the 2012 in-person vote that state records attribute to a man who was, by every available piece of evidence, training to become a Navy SEAL in Southern California.
Schwarze frames the problem as systemic.
"Just like the fraud is an iceberg, the tax fraud, once we start rolling that iceberg over, we don't know how big it gets until we fully investigate it."
He added: "This clearly shows that we have an election integrity issue in our state."
The Secretary of State's office, for its part, offered MIT rankings and reassurances about public trust. It did not offer an explanation. It did not offer an investigation. It did not even acknowledge the specific allegation.
That is a telling response from an office that claims transparency is "an essential part of maintaining trust in the system." A Navy veteran presents military orders proving he was in California, state records showing someone voted under his name in Minnesota, and the best the state can muster is a press release about how great its elections are.
Schwarze put it simply:
"I've fought my entire life for the United States of America. I fought for democracy all over the world. And one of the pillars and foundational principles of democracy is free, fair and transparent elections, and we don't have any of those things right now in the United States of America."
When a man who trained to be a SEAL can't get a straight answer about a vote cast in his name, "the envy of the nation" starts to sound less like a credential and more like a punchline.
