Minnesota by the Numbers

Minnesota's public argument runs on numbers almost nobody has checked. A think tank publishes a figure, a campaign repeats it, a headline rounds it, and six months later it is a fact that everyone knows and no one can source.

This series does the opposite. Each article starts from the primary record — the IRS's own migration files, the Census Bureau's population estimates, the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension's crime reports, Public Utilities Commission rate cases, Health Department hearing dockets, Legislative Auditor findings, court records — and reports what is actually there.

The rules

1. Primary data or nothing. Where a number could be computed from the source file, it was computed rather than repeated from someone's summary.
2. Contested claims are attributed, never asserted. Where credible people disagree — on tax flight, on fraud estimates, on the cost of a mandate — each side gets its own best sourced case.
3. Every article concedes something inconvenient. Facts that cut against the author's own politics are in the text, not the footnotes.
4. Sourced or omitted. Figures that could not be verified against a real source were left out, and the article says so.
5. It ends with what we can do. Diagnosis without a remedy is just complaining.

Spot an error? Tell us — corrections are part of the standard, and they get published.