Marvin Lepp for North Dakota Secretary of State

You don’t wake up one day and say to yourself, “Hey, I want to be Secretary of State in North Dakota.”

This was not an overnight decision by any means. There has been a lot of thought and prayer that has gone into this over the past two years. I have wanted to do more within this great state of ours for a while, but have always put it off with finding an excuse why the time wasn’t right.

Many do not know the side of me that has a deep love for history and politics. Most of the time I keep those things to myself. I have always enjoyed pandering to a good political debate with family just because its fun to rile them up at family functions.

The biggest non-excuse reason has been my biggest hold up. We are a single income household. I work full time, averaging 40-50 hours a week to provide for our family. My amazing wife is a full time stay-at-home mother to our little girl and has been since the day she was born.

So, when we first started discussing this nearly two years ago, the first question that she asked me was, “What would you want to do?” I worked my way through the different elected positions ranging from township board, to city or county commissioners, and even a legislator for my district. That never felt right. If I was truly going to commit to this, I wanted it to be a full time position.

It wasn’t until two weeks ago that it really settled in when I had gone out to supper with a friend. We hadn’t seen each other in nearly a year. Life had gone in different directions for both of us. While we were sitting there sharing a meal, we got onto one of our favorite topics, North Dakota politics.

Redistricting was the first part topic of the evening. After a prayer and as the meal progressed, we cover topics ranging from local races to the race between Dr. Rick Becker and Senator John Hoeven. Finally, the conversation settled on Secretary of State. I had known that Mr. Al Jaeger was retiring but, was surprised that House Representative Michael Howe was going uncontested to the State Convention for the spot.

I asked about multiple people that I thought were running for the position including Deputy Secretary of State, Jim Silrum. I was startled that even he was not running. Three hours later, we parted ways and I went home to a very restless night.