Context

Every Justice on this Court practiced law before taking the bench. All five spent time in private practice. Four of the five were also district judges, presiding over trials before joining the Supreme Court.

“Never even tried a case” does not remotely describe anyone on this Court, and if Mr. Johnson will “often hear” this, he should correct it rather than repeat these false statements about the qualifications of the current Justices.

Mr. Johnson has argued his own cases to this Court, and he has written about them on his campaign page. Here is what the opinions show about who decided them.

• His “clear win.” On August 27 he wrote about Kluver v. SGJ Holdings, a Dunn County jury trial he called “a clear win.” The Supreme Court affirmed that verdict unanimously. The opinion of the Court was written by Justice Jerod Tufte and joined by Justices Jensen, McEvers, and Bahr, along with then-Justice Crothers. Kluver v. SGJ Holdings, LLC, 2023 ND 65.
• His Pugh clause case. Mr. Johnson argued and won Tank v. Citation Oil & Gas Corp., a Pugh clause appeal. Justice McEvers sat on that panel. 2014 ND 123.

The Justices he says have gaps are Justices who decided his cases, including the one he calls a clear win.

Justice Tufte earned a computer engineering degree, magna cum laude, and worked as an engineer at Motorola before law school. He then practiced as a prosecutor and a solo lawyer before joining the bench, and he is a past chair of the Court Technology Committee. Court biography.

As for reasons never shared: in the same September 17 post, Mr. Johnson quotes the written reply he received from the State Court Administrator. It said the issues he raised were not “sufficient to justify the cost and labor involved in switching vendors or to undertake the process of designing and building a custom system.” He also writes that he was put on a call with the vendor. He disagrees with the answer.

Mr. Johnson asks readers to take Roosevelt’s words in their entirety. Here they are:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt, “Citizenship in a Republic,” address at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910, in African and European Addresses (G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1910) (text)

Roosevelt gave the credit to the one who carries the responsibility, not to the one who points out where the work could have been done better. On court technology, Mr. Johnson has told us which of the two he is. By his own description, he has worked “from outside the Court.” From there he has pointed out real flaws in the e-filing system, and some of his complaints are fair. That is a useful thing for a lawyer to do. It is also the part Roosevelt assigned to the critic.

The arena on this question is where the trade-offs are made and answered for. The reply Mr. Johnson received from the State Court Administrator, which he quotes himself, weighed his list of defects against “the cost and labor involved in switching vendors or to undertake the process of designing and building a custom system.” A court system works within a budget the Legislature sets. Every dollar spent on one improvement is a dollar that cannot be spent on another, and the people responsible for the choice answer for it either way.

A lawyer filing a brief sees the bug in front of him. The Court has to see every clerk of court, every county, every self-represented litigant, and every competing need at once. That is a different arena from a courtroom, and Roosevelt’s credit goes to the one who “errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.”

Mr. Johnson asks voters to trust his technical skills with the courts’ software. In this race he has been responsible for one public-facing system: his own campaign website, the one he tells voters to visit for details.

At 4:32 p.m. on October 9, the security certificate for johnsonforjustice.org expired. Anyone who loaded the site while the certificate was expired was met by a full-page browser warning instead of his campaign.

It is not the first time. The site’s certificate also expired on June 30, and that time the warning stayed up for eleven days, until a new certificate was installed on July 11. That certificate was good for ninety days. It ran out on schedule, with no renewal. Every certificate issued for a website is recorded in public logs, so anyone can check these dates: certificate history for johnsonforjustice.org.

Keeping a certificate current is about as routine as website upkeep gets. The kind his site uses is free and built to renew automatically. Nothing suggests anyone’s information was actually at risk; the warning appears because the certificate lapsed. That is the point. This is the easy part.

A statewide court system is not the easy part. It has to work for every clerk, every county, and every litigant, every day, on a budget the Legislature sets. Mr. Johnson says the people responsible for court technology should have “no excuses.” Twice now, the one system his own campaign is responsible for has turned voters away for lack of a routine renewal. Voters can weigh that against his promise to fix the courts’ software.

Justice Tufte and his wife, Mylynn, settled on a farm in rural Kidder County in 2005. He served as the county’s State’s Attorney while he was its only lawyer, then as a district judge in the Southeast Judicial District. He served eight years as a Judge Advocate in the North Dakota Army National Guard, including overseas service in Kosovo.

That is not “from afar.”

Any candidate can promise good judgment. For someone new to the bench, voters have to take that promise on faith. An incumbent’s judgment can be checked against the written record. Justice Tufte has taken part in more than 2,300 Supreme Court cases and written hundreds of the Court’s opinions. Every one is public.

Read them at ndcourts.gov, and see his record and judicial philosophy.

Justice Tufte did not reach the Supreme Court by appointment. He ran for an open seat in 2016 and won it from the voters with 60.7 percent of the vote. Secretary of State results.

As for political endorsements: the North Dakota Monitor reported on September 21 that Republican state Sen. Dale Patten of Watford City endorsed Mr. Johnson at a meet-and-greet. Sen. Patten told the paper Mr. Johnson did not know it was coming. North Dakota Monitor, Sept. 21, 2026.

Those two promises pull in different directions. If an earlier court misread what the Legislature wrote, Mr. Johnson’s rule keeps the misreading in place for as long as the Legislature is silent. Applying the law as written means reading the words the Legislature actually enacted. When the Court has gotten those words wrong, the text is still the law.

As for “a deep understanding of the facts,” Mr. Johnson explained the problem himself on July 28: the Supreme Court “doesn’t hold trials at all. It reviews the legal decisions made in District Court and, generally, defers to the factual decisions made there, by judge or jury.” The facts belong to the jury and the trial judge. A Justice’s job is to get the law right.