Last year, the City of Minot held a special mayoral election that made statewide headlines. In part, because the previous mayor had resigned in disgrace after sending a pornographic text message to the city attorney. In part, also, because of the cast of four candidates running to replace him, two of which had significant criminal records.

Josiah Roise was one of those two -- he was charged with resisting arrest in Florida, and at one point was deemed a fugitive -- and he's running again this year against Mayor Mark Jantzer, who won last year's special election. Roise, who brands himself a "constituitonal mayor," got just 324 when he ran last time, though he attributes that at least in part to what he characterizes as vote fraud.

"People that voted for me, people that I've never met before, all reported the same thing, which is that they put their ballot into the machine and it basically just eats it like an ATM will do that sometimes," he said on this episode of Plain Talk in an interview requested by his campaign.

Roise says he made complaints to local and statewide election officials, though when pressed, he admitted that he hasn't brought the matter to court. He also claims to received input from the participant in a widely debunked film '2000 Mules' by political provacateur Dinesh D'Souza alleging fraud in the naitonal 2020 election, though even D'Souza himself has now backed away from its central claims.

Roise, who filed a federal lawsuit against the Minot Police Department and Ward County Sheriff's Department over a search warrant executed on his property for bomb-making materials (an associate of Roise's later pleaded guilty to two felonies related to detonating a pipe bomb), also claims that local law enforcement attempted to plant drugs on his person.

"I could smell the marijuana on the officers. And it's like, wow, my instincts were right not to comply, not to let them search my truck. They kept on saying, 'If you just let it s let us search it, we'll be out of here real quick.' They were going to plant it on me. So, it's like, I have zero trust in them," he said.

Why does he call himself a constitutional candidate? "The biggest things are spending and government accountability," he said during our interview. "When you try and hold the government accountable,when you, you know, sue them or do whatever it is, it doesn't even really work because the system is kind of bent against the average American," he continued. "And we're just supposed to be a government of the people, by the people, for the people. It's not supposed to be this thing where the government rules over you. We're supposed to be on a level playing field."

Roise says he'd like to cut $6 million from the City of Minot's budget, and proposed merging the Minot Police Department with the local sheriff's department under the theory that police department's aren't constitutional. He argued that the modern police department is a "bureaucracy" and a "British thing" that America's founding fathers deliberately chose not to include in the Constitution.

"I thought we need to only have sheriffs and deputies because sheriffs are elected. Please chiefs are not," he said. "So, if you got a bad, abusive or corrupt police chief, how do you get rid of him? You have to convince the majority of the city council and the mayor that he's got to go, and that's their guy."

Roise's theory about constitutional sheriffs was a key tenet in the Posse Comitatus movement of the 1970s founded by William Potter Gale. Perhaps the most infamous adherent of Gale's movement was Gordon Kahl, the leader of a Posse Comitatus chapter in Medina that got into a deadly standoff with U.S. Marshals in 1983.

"In fact, the sheriff is the highest official in his county," Roise told us during the interview. "On his turf, he's about equal to governor. Like, the sheriff is above the mayor. He's above everybody else. The sheriff is the most powerful. And that's how it is in all 50 states."

Also on this episode, guest co-host Rep. Zac Ista and I discuss a recent report commissioned by the legislature about term limits. The report found strong support for term limits, but also some confusion about who they apply to among voters.

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