Secretary of State Mark Ritchie must be a progressive powerhouse. He got dual mentions (of sorts) in The Nation’s list of Most Valuable Progressives: one for his work overseeing the statewide recount and one by way of a nonprofit he founded, the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP). The magazine’s John Nichols contrasts how Ritchie is managing the complicated recount — an “example of how to do elections right” — with the “abusive approaches” of infamous Secretaries of State, Katherine Harris, who presided over the 2000 presidential recount in Florida, and Ohio’s Ken Blackwell, who oversaw the controversial 2004 presidential election.

“In the face of attacks on his politics and character by partisans who seek to game the system, Ritchie has remained steadfast and good-humored, emphasizing transparency, fairness and the principle that democracy is only made real when election officials assure that the intentions of voters are respected and recorded,” Nichols writes.

Ritchie founded IATP in his South Minneapolis house in 1986, but Nichols salutes IATP’s Steve Suppan, Shiney Varghese and Ben Lilliston (along with the rest of the staff) for being “so far ahead of the curve” in addressing crises now facing farmers and the world’s hungry. The magazine heralds the group’s November report, “Commodities Market Speculation: The Risk to Food Security and Agriculture” [pdf] — which addressed how agricultural commodities speculation drove wild swings in food prices (and hunger) worldwide — as a “finer piece of financial journalism than anything produced by the Wall Street Journal or CNBC.”