Category Archives: Election Integrity

It’s Just The Normal Noises In Here

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Minnesota election law requires party delegates at the convention to designate electors and alternates.  Minnesota Republicans failed to do that at their convention so party big-shots designated some afterwards.  Democrats correctly pointed out this duct-tape fix failed to comply with the law and asked the Supreme Court to strike Trump’s name from the ballot.

The Secretary of State objected that early voting starts in 11 days and they’ve already printed a million ballots so it would cost a fortune to change the ballots now. The Supreme Court decided the Democrats had waited too long to bring the challenge and ruled against them based on the ancient equitable doctrine of laches.

 Laches?  Laches?!? That’s Republicans’ ace in the hole?  That’s their big defense? 

 Laches is one of those kitchen-sink defenses you throw into the Answer when you’re totally desperate and have no defense on the merits of the case.  It’s for losers and scoundrels and weasels.  A major political party trying to get a Presidential candidate onto the ballot shouldn’t be relying on laches.

 They really are the Stupid Party. 

 Joe Doakes

But why did the DFL file the suit – which, but for logistics and the appeal to, ahem, laches, might have succeeded?

Michael Brodkorb, newly at MinnPost, breaks that down.   Short story short; there are people who get paid to be cynical about things like rules.

Voter Suppression

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In perhaps the most bald-faced violation of Berg’s Seventh Law in history, the DFL – which is constantly whinging about phantom claims of “voter suppression” – is actively trying to disenfranchise half of this state’s electorate in the Presidential election.

DFL Chair Ken “Dwight Schrute” Martin is sueing to keep Donald Trump off the Minnesota ballot in November, over an absurd, abstruse technicality in election law:

The Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s Thursday lawsuit claims the Minnesota Republican Party failed to nominate its presidential electors, the people who cast the state’s 10 electoral college votes, in accordance with state law. Keith Downey, the chair of the Minnesota Republican Party, said last month that the party called a special meeting to approve alternative electors because it had previously neglected to do so.

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One of these people is imitating Mussolini. The other was a character on a hit TV show.

The suit, which was filed directly to the Minnesota Supreme Court, adds a new level of chaos to an already strange election season. It could cause the parties to spend some of the rushed final eight weeks of the election fighting in court, distracting from other campaigning. While the suit is a technical one, if successful, it could affect the entire presidential election.

If the DFL wins – and one would think even Minnesota’s absurdly liberal Supreme Court couldn’t possibly be that obtuse – then long-time friend of this blog Dave Thul had a great idea; every conservative should vote for Jill Stein, and make the Greens a major party in Minnesota, sapping DFL votes for at least the next four years and drawing money from the DFL’s graft pool.

There’s also a part of me that hopes Martin “wins”.  This – the most baldfaced example of corruption masquerading as law I’ve seen in my lifetime – would stand a good chance of opening an epic floodgate of support for Trump, or at least against Hillary’s party.

Ballot Fodder

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A regular reader of this blog (whose name does not rhyme with “Moe Jokes”) writes:

I know this has been talked about in Minneapolis for a few months, but when I read the following, I just couldn’t help but think that if you don’t rate voting as a high priority, perhaps you shouldn’t be voting.  Perhaps, if you need your landlord to hold your hand through life’s responsibilities, you aren’t yet ready to live away from your parents.

“Council Member Jacob Frey, who sponsored the measure, said he could have used the reminder about voter registration when he was younger and frequently changed apartments.

“When you’re thinking about your study group and your track team and the girlfriend and the social and what you’re going to do that weekend, and all the other trillions of stimuli that you have at a university, for instance, you don’t think to register,” Frey said.”

You ever notice how the Democrat “get out the vote” machine is focused almost to exclusion on reaching people who don’t pay much attention to government and politics?

There’s a reason for that.

Democracia Ahora!

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¡Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

When I went outside this morning to put up my American flag, a pickup full of illegal immigrants stopped to ask if this is where they vote Democrat For Immigration Amnesty. No dude, that’s the Rec Center down the street. And they don’t open til 8. Yes, ocho. Yeah you have a good day, too.

In Saint Paul, the line between satire and truth is so gray and blurry, it hardly exists.

Calibrated

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Back in 2006, they told us that electronic voting machines were going to be an easy, non-transparent way to hijack elections. 

And they were right:

Republican state representative candidate Jim Moynihan went to vote Monday at the Schaumburg Public Library.

“I tried to cast a vote for myself and instead it cast the vote for my opponent,” Moynihan said. “You could imagine my surprise as the same thing happened with a number of races when I tried to vote for a Republican and the machine registered a vote for a Democrat.”

The conservative website Illinois Review reported that “While using a touch screen voting machine in Schaumburg, Moynihan voted for several races on the ballot, only to find that whenever he voted for a Republican candidate, the machine registered the vote for a Democrat in the same race. He notified the election judge at his polling place and demonstrated that it continued to cast a vote for the opposing candidate’s party. Moynihan was eventually allowed to vote for Republican candidates, including his own race.

There’s a simple answer, of course:

 “This was a calibration error of the touch-screen on the machine,” Scalzitti said. “When Mr. Moynihan used the touch-screen, it improperly assigned his votes due to improper calibration.”

“I’m not robbing this bank, officer; I’m just doing a bad job of calibrating the safe”.

“That’s not a crack pipe under my seat, officer; its a poorly-calibrated CPAP mask”. 

“Those weren’t dead people voting; just poorly-calibrated living people”. 

I’m not going to say the Democrats are a criminal syndicate.  I’m just wondering how they’d have to behave any differently to be one…

Despicable Steve

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It hasn’t been a good campaign for DFL Secretary of State candidate Steve Simon. 

For starters, he barely got over 40% in the primary – against a perennial candidate and a nobody.  Which might not have been a showstopper for the DFL machine to overcome, except that they were up against Dan Severson, who has statewide name recognition from a 2010 SOS run and a Senate bid (that came up short in the convention in 2012). 

Then, last week, the polls showed that Severson was ahead of Simon; he was the only GOP statewide candidate to lead in the polls at that time.  

At the very least – given the polling that, we are told, shows Mark Dayton supposedly cruising to victory – it’s a sign that the DFL/Big Money Democrat onslaught has a chink in the armor. 

At the most?  It shows that the DFL’s “We’re Inevitable!” vibe may not be entirely factual. 

Severson’s press conference last week – in which he showed smoking guns tying the SOS office to a policy of tossing veterans’ votes, and Rep. Simon’s signature on legislation that exempted the military from absentee voter reforms – went badly for Simon, and worse for the DFL’s Ken Martin, who tried and failed to take a chunk out of Severson in a comical morning of duelling press conferences. 

Simon is apparently desperate; he’s now telling his base that Severson proposes “forcing rape victims to pay for rape kits”. 

It’s BS, of course.  Not just the usual, comical, inept BS the DFL tosses around at this point in campaigns, all juvenile photoshopped heads and racist japes. 

No.  This is a sleazy, toxic, intentional, cowardly lie.  Severson responds (and I’ll add emphasis):

I moved it forward with the understanding that the bill would propose sharing the cost of all expenses associated with sexual assault between the counties of the victim and the perpetrator.

I specifically killed the bill before it EVER got a hearing because of the language specific to victims having to pay for anything.

In a just world, whatever DFL messaging genius that came up with this attack would get some sense groin-kicked into him.

As it stands?  Since a lie will make it around the world before the truth has finished checking Facebook in the morning, it’s back to the long, slow slog of telling people the one central truth of Minnesota politics.

If a DFLer says it, it’s a lie. 

If a DFLer who’s losing says it, it’s probably defamation.

Call It A 2016 Election Dress Rehearsal…

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DFL Representative Steve Simon is running for Secretary of State against GOP endorsed candidate Dan Severson. 

He’s had kind of a rough race so far; during the primaries, he came in with barely over 40% of the DFL vote, against a perennial candidate (Dick Fransen, who’s sort of a downmarket Ole Savior) and an unknown.  He’s got no name recognition to speak of (as compared to Dan Severson, who is a former state rep, SOS and Senate candidate). 

So he’s gotta get some name recognition – “popularity” – somehow, between now and November.

Now, as of last summer, Simon had a set of Twitter followers that, quite frankly, would befit a candidate who could only eke out 42% in his own party’s primary; around about a thousand or so.

Then, suddenly, BOOM: he was over 70,000 followers.

A case of Steve-mentum?

Probably not. It would seem the Simon campaign has chosen to try to buy some popularity – at least on Twitter:

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A “TwitterAudit” shows that at least 55,000 of Simon’s 70,000 followers are probably fakes.  An email from a GOP analyst explains:

This typically indicates that someone has purchased a list of fake subscribers.

Some of the earmarks of “list buyers” are:

  • Twitter accounts that are in a foreign language (paging thru his followers, it’s remarkable how many are in Russian, Asian and Arabic (yes, Arabic)
  • Twitter accounts that have no image of a real person next to them, but instead just have what is called the “Twitter egg” – again, paging thru Steve’s followers, it’s clear that a majority of his followers are “eggs”.

Check out the Twitteraudit yourself.

If this is how he runs his Twitter account, imagine what he’ll do for the voter rolls!

“But wait, Merg!  Lots of people, yourself included, have lots of spam followers on Twitter!  I mean, look at how popular you seem to be with 18 year old Filipinas!”.  Spam followers are certainly an issue on Twitter – everyone’s got ’em – but having one’s number of overall followers multiply by almost two orders of magnitude in less time than it’s taking me to type about it is not just the sign of some staff intern getting happy fingers on the “Follow!” buttons. 

“But Merg!  Maybe Simon’s account was hacked!”.  Maybe.  Show us the evidence that a “malicious” “hack” just happened to inflate a less-than-popular candidate’s numbers into Twitterverse regional A-lister levels, and we can talk. 

I’ll wait. 

But I’m not going to hold my breath, if it’s all right with you. 

Continue reading →

Best Voting System In America!

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They warned me that if I voted Republican, there’d be a wave of claims of voter fraud when ethnic minorities tried to vote.

And they were right!

GOP operative Heather Linville put it well on Twitter:

@H_Linville: Oh…. OK. So now voter fraud exists, because a democrat might lose her seat. Got it! http://t.co/CwKIYpMm3j #stribpol

From the Strib:

The attorney for Phyllis Kahn says he got word Thursday night; there might be hundreds of people who are registering and voting using an address that’s not their home.
Absentee voting kicked-off Friday morning in a hotly contested democratic primary race for the state house between incumbent Phyllis Kahn and Mohamud Noor.

Republican operator Heather Linville put it best on Twitter

@H_Linville: Oh…. OK. So now voter fraud exists, because a democrat might lose her seat. Got it! http://t.co/CwKIYpMm3j #stribpol

Stop me if you’ve heard this before (emphasis added):

Brian Rice, attorney for the Phyllis Kahn Volunteer Committee, claims there’s voter fraud.
“I think there is a coordinated effort to use this address to bring voters into the DFL primary election on August 12, that’s what I think is going on,” Rice said. “It’s wrong, it violates Minnesota Law, it’s a crime.”
According to voter registration records from the Secretary of State’s office and the DFL Voter Activation Network more than 140 people used 419 Cedar Avenue South in Minneapolis as their home address, when they registered to vote.
The address is for what’s called Cedar Mailbox Center. The building manager and mail center’s employees weren’t comfortable speaking on camera, but they said they were surprised by the allegations.

Of course, during the 2010 elections the Minnesota Majority noted scads of such irregularities – including nine people listing a laundromat as their “home” address.  The response?

“It can’t be!”

Why?

“We have the best election system in the country”. 

Until it’s Phyllis Kahn being defrauded, of course.

TANGENT:  Remember when the only reason to claim voter fraud was racism?  Why do Rep. Kahn and the DFL hate Somalis, anyway?

Inconvenient Inconsistency

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Judge Guthmann ruled that the Secretary of State had no authority to establish an on-line voter registration site. He ordered it taken down at once.

So . . . where’d the money come from? Misappropriation of funds should be an impeachable offense.

Also . . . to register on-line, you must enter a Minnesota Driver’s License, Minnesota State ID number, or the last four digits of your Social Security number. I thought it was racist to demand that stuff? Shouldn’t racism be an impeachable offense, too?

Joe Doakes

Only the wrong racism.

Dayton Administration: “Rules Are For Peasants!”

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The State Auditor confirmed what this blog pointed out a year and change ago; Governor Dayton’s use of a state plane to haul campaign staff on junkets that either mixed official and campaign business, or involved no state business whatsoever, violated the law:

At issue were three separate trips Dayton took using a Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) airplane. During the fall of 2012, in the run-up to that year’s election, Dayton flew out of St. Paul for appearances in Willmar, Brainerd and Bemidji. On each trip, Dayton combined official state business with political events; a subsequent flight from Bemidji to International Falls was made for purely political purposes. On that flight, Dayton’s travel companions on the plane included Julie Hottinger, a campaign staffer who is not employed by the state.

Using the plane to transport Dayton and Hottinger for a political event was determined to be a violation of both state statute and MnDOT policy. According to the code of ethics for executive branch employees, state funds, resources or property cannot be deployed for “any … use not in the interest of the state.” The audit report spells out certain exceptions to that law, including security detail personnel, who will travel with the governor regardless of the nature of an event.

In this instance, Dayton’s staff argued that the use of the official plane was a matter of security, telling OLA investigators that the MnDOT aircraft gives the administration staff greater control over equipment and choice of pilots.

The report recommendations find that the state-issued plane should not be used if the governor is traveling only for a political reason, or is bringing political staffers. But, for cases when a governor plans to attend both official and political functions, the current law lacks clarity, and the OLA recommends that the Legislature take up the issue to spell out its legality.

“In the meantime,” the report states, “we recommend that Governor Dayton encourage his office staff and campaign staff to schedule his travel in ways that strictly limit the use of a state airplane to attend political events.”

In an official response penned on behalf of Dayton, chief of staff Tina Smith said the state’s paying for Hottinger’s travel resulted from “an error and will not happen again.” Smith also points out that the Dayton campaign had intended all along to split costs for the trips that combined both public and political activities, and reimbursed the state fully for the trip from Bemidji to International Falls.

As always with the DFL – with the damage long done, Governor Dayton apologized. 

How many passes will the DFL get when it comes to cheating on state campaign laws?

“Trust Us: Smoke Never Means Fire!”

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James O’Keefe and his merry band of prankersters are able to fraudulently obtain ballots 97 percent of the time:

New York City’s Department of Investigation (DOI) has just shown how easy it is to commit voter fraud that is almost undetectable. Its undercover agents were able to obtain ballots for city elections a total of 61 times — 39 times using the names of dead people, 14 times using the names of incarcerated felons, and eight times using the names of non-residents. On only two occasions, or about 3 percent of the time, were the agents stopped by polling-place officials. In one of the two cases, an investigator was stopped only because the felon he was trying to vote in the name of was the son of the election official he was dealing with.

Clearly, O’Keefe has overstepped the bounds of…

…wait.  I said O’Keefe, didn’t I?  What did the article actually say?

The New York Department of Investigation’s report doesn’t address the serious issue of absentee-ballot fraud, where at least a paper trail to catch fraud can be created. But it does highlight a troubling case indicating that voter impersonation Chicago-style is still with us.

Oh. 

Um…

Fox News!

The Media/Non-Profit Racket

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In past months, I’ve showed you how not only big-media-alum group-blog MinnPost, but “No Rant, No Slant” Minnesota Public Radio are on the take from the Joyce Foundation – which funds “Protect MN”, the anti-rights group run by Rep. Heather Martens.  I speculated that it might be the reason that MPR has been so incurious about Martens’ astroturf group, and why the MinnPost – with all its pretenses to legitimate journalism – spent the past year giving Martens a public tongue bath.

I asked – does this involvement go any higher in the Twin Cities’ “progressive” political world?

I asked, and Bill Glahn answered – ten months ago.  Joyce is a huge financial backer of “Take Action MN”, a non-profit that verges on being a political party in its own right, a descendent of “Progressive Minnesota”, which had its own unseemly connections with “non-partisan” institutions.

Glahn:

The Joyce Foundation of Chicago, Illinois, was founded by Iowa lumber heiress Beatrice Joyce Kean.  This $760 million foundation has been involved with TakeAction since near the beginning of the Minnesota non-profit’s existence.  Joyce’s 2006 Annual Report (p. 25) shows a grant of $350,000 to be paid out to TakeAction over two years, “To develop and promote a political reform agenda focused on campaign finance, judicial, and voting rights reforms.”
Joyce’s 2009 IRS Form 990 reveals that the $350,000 grant to the 501(c)(3) TakeAction Minnesota Education Fund was renewed in 2008 for two additional years, “for ongoing efforts to reform and strengthen democracy in Minnesota.”[12]
Joyce’s 2011 IRS Form 990 reveals that, yet again, the $350,000 grant to the TakeAction Education Fund was renewed in 2010 for two additional years, “For advancing a political reform agenda that encompasses election administration, voting rights, campaign finance, redistricting, and judicial independence.”[13]

The Joyce Foundation’s website indicates that the TakeAction Education Fund received an additional $150,000 in 2012 for one year, “For advancing a democracy reform agenda using legislation, community organizing, movement building, coalition work, and unexpected alliances.”
Unexpected alliances?  In any event, the seven-year total of grants from the Joyce Foundation to TakeAction equals $1,200,000.

So let’s break this down:  The Joyce Foundation heavily sponsors “Progressive” non-profits, including “Take Action MN”, “Protect MN”, and (I strongly suspect) “Common Cause MN”.

And they pour money into at least two “non-profit” Minnesota media outlets that have pretensions to respectability; Minnesota Public Radio and the MinnPost.

I’ve sought comment from both organizations in the past, without success.  I’ll try again.

All of this carefully obfuscated money going to support “campaign finance…reforms” is one thing.

Going to buy friendly media coverage?

And finding willing takers, in an industry whose “code of ethics” tells journalists who avoid financial entanglements in their “journalism?”

Berg’s Seventh Law Is Everywhere

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

When the IRS scandal broke and Progressives were poo-pooing it, I said it wasn’t about mistakes or miscommunication but voter suppression.  The Obama Administration used the IRS to prevent conservatives from raising money to get their message out, so Romney lost the election.

Now there’s proof.

All that time Dog Gone was howling about voter suppression, she was engaging in one of your most famous laws.

I knew it.

Joe Doakes

Eventually everyone knows it.

The Real Question

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Mark Ritchie, two-term Secretary of State and George Soros beneficiary, will be leaving the Secretary of State’s office after two terms.

His main accomplishments:  bringing electoral reform to three grossly-underserved communities: the Fictional-Americans, Duplicate-Americans and Deceased-Americans.

They will no doubt miss him.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong

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Senator Dave Osmek (GOP SD33) writes – and I’ll add emphasis:

Here’s a really bad bill: SF271 (Champion). Its not the language in the bill…it’s the repealer. We’re repealing all residency requirements for drivers licenses. Its designed to allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses.

Of course, we all know what else you can do with a driver’s license. Vote. Not to mention that a driver’s license is one of the primary forms of ID for an I9 form or getting a passport.

It passed Transportation/Public Safety on a DFL party-line vote. I complained hard about this thing. In talking with one of the more “reasonable” DFLers after the hearing, he said: You’re making too much out of this, Besides, they all vote for US (giggle…giggle).

Remember – it won’t be “election fraud” if it’s perfectly legal by the time of the next election.

The Unions Buy Minnesota

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So how much money did Big Labor spend along with Big Lefty Plutocrat to buy the Governor’s Office and the Legislature?

If you believe the Strib, it’s “around $3 million.

If you believe the Strib is going to tell the truth about DFL perfidy – and especially the big money behind the DFL, I’ve got a 50% stake in the next Lindsay Lohan movie to sell you.

Bill Walsh, long-time Minnesota political operative, did a little digging into the story – and he’s got something the Twin Cities’ mainstream media doesn’t want to give you; the facts:

I’m publishing his piece as a guest writer at Shot In The Dark today.

———-

Unions Spent $11.1 Million in 2012 to Buy Friendly Legislature for Gov. Mark Dayton

Bill Walsh, Shot In The Dark Guest Writer

A few weeks ago the Star Tribune published an article about campaign spending in the 2012 election focusing on two big individual donors – Alida Messinger and Bob Cummins. The conclusion? Each party has a big donor that gave lots of money, it’s all a wash. I’m afraid this story is all we’re going to get from the Strib on campaign spending analysis. Today, in an otherwise well written article on union influence at the capitol this year, Rachel Stassen-Berger writes that unions “put at least $3 million into elections.” I guess $11.1 million is “at least” $3 million. She’s only off by $8.1 million.

I took the time to go through the campaign finance reports of 111 different union organizations in Minnesota and nationally for the 2012 election. Spending ranged from Education Minnesota at $1.8 million to the Bemidji Central Labor Body AFL-CIO Political Fund at $250. State and local unions accounted for $9.1 million in campaign spending with national unions kicking in the other $2 million.

Union Contributions 2012 by

It took some time to come to the right numbers because many unions give money to each other for joint spending initiatives. These numbers reflect the net spending after backing out contributions between unions. It goes without saying that over 99% of the money went to DFL candidates and causes.

I blame myself for not getting this research to the StarTribune before they published today’s article. It really would have added some punch to their story.

For example, when talking about the nurses union asking the legislature for new staffing ratios that will drive up health care costs, it would have been useful to point out to readers the nurses union spent over $500,000 helping DFL candidates win back the legislature last year. As a matter of fact, that probably should be mentioned every time the media covers the progress of this legislation.

Likewise, when discussing AFSCME’s attempt to force unionization on small private childcare businesses, it would inform the reader to mention that seven different AFSCME organizations gave a total of $1.6 million to DFL candidates and causes in 2012.

The list goes on – Education Minnesota is trying to resurrect their statewide insurance pool legislation, MAPE and AFSCME are getting new generous employment contracts, the minimum wage is being increased and Dayton is following through on his promise to raise taxes on the rich.

But business spends a lot too, right? Wrong. It’s hard to get anywhere near $11.1 million if you add up the business money spent in the 2012 election. A business friendly PAC called Minnesota’s Future spent $1.2 million while the Chamber of Commerce-supported Coalition for Minnesota Businesses spent just $283,000 on the 2012 election. We all know the MNGOP received little support from the business community and the two legislative caucuses combined to spend only $4.1 million, and not all of that can be attributed to business.

According to today’s Pioneer Press, however, business interests do spend a lot on lobbying. The Campaign Finance Board reported that business interests spent $17.4 million lobbying the legislature during the 2011 session.

This may be the key to understanding today’s political environment. Unions spend heavily getting sympathetic Democrats elected to office. Once they are in place, it doesn’t take much money to lobby –the jury is already selected.

Business on the other hand, spends relatively little on the nuts and bolts of campaigns and prefers to hire lobbyists to try to influence the debate after the legislature has been selected.

What’s next?

First, Republican legislators need to hammer away on the $11.1 million unions spent to buy this legislature for Gov. Mark Dayton. They need to remind the public and the press at every opportunity to follow the money. Pay to play has never been more obvious in Minnesota.

Second, the business community needs to shift some of its resources to where it matters: the 2014 general election. Business will never match the collective self interest and desperation of the unions, so we need to reach a higher level of cooperation if we hope to recapture the House and win back the governor’s office in 2014.

———-

MITCH ADDS:  More on this in coming weeks.

One Silver Lining

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Mary Franson wins her recount in House District 8B.

Franson, a freshman Republican from Alexandria, picked up one extra vote Thursday when Otter Tail County recounted its ballots. In the end, Franson had 4,799 votes in Otter Tail to Cunniff’s 3,790 votes.

Cunniff’s attorneys are challenging four of the ballots in Otter Tail County, and the campaigns also challenged one vote each in Douglas. But the combined challenges wouldn’t be enough to hand Cunniff the win in the state’s closest election of 2012.

This close win by Franson in a bad year for the MNGOP, and against one of the DFL’s  sleaziest campaigns in a year where the DFL buried the sleaze-o-meter, is good news; there are at least some parts of the state with a little sanity.

And it’s fascinating how little the vote counts actually swung in a recount run mostly be Republicans, isn’t it?

By the way – even though DFL candidate Bob Cunniff conceded yesterday, as the Strib notes…:

The recount results are unofficial until the state canvassing board meets on Dec. 4 at 1:30 p.m. There is also always a possiblity of a court challenge to the election results.

And given that trial lawyers are among the DFL’s main constituencies, I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

But ’til then, congratulations Rep. Franson!

UPDATE:  John Gilmore echoes thoughts a lot of us agree with:

Last legislative session we didn’t have any leaders. In fact, we had anti-leaders. Morons. Incompetents.

Not even status quo: our new majority made things worse. They earned their minority status this election cycle but the better good of Minnesota did not.

Enter Mary Franson: new, naive, honest, sometimes bumbling. Extremely well spoken on the floor of the MN House of Representatives and off.

But wait! Can she navigate The Wedge? Tell the difference of quinoa from teff?

No and here’s hoping she never does. Would it be too post modern to take a field trip to Alexandria?

During the DFL-manufactured “Animals” fracas last spring, the GOP establishment couldn’t have shot Franson under the bus any faster if they’d loaded her into a wrist-rocket.

To paraphrase The Boss:  she’s still there, they’re all gone.  Well, some of them, anyway.

 

Know When To Hold ‘Em

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Minnesota is plagued with voter fraud.  The evidence – both empirical (200 convictions in Ramsey County – the only county that the Minnesota Majority was able to browbeat into taking actual evidence seriously) and anecdotal (yet again, the stories from the U of M and many precincts in the Fourth and Fifth CDs demand an investigation that will never come) is everywhere.

Most Minnesotans that pay attention and aren’t bobbleheaded Fraud Denialists – the people who’ve grown adept at plugging their ears and chanting “nya nya nya best system in the country la la la” – know this.

So why did the Voter ID Amendment fail?

Not because it wasn’t needed, or because a majority of Minnesotans who actually pay attention voted “no”.

Dan McGrath – who led the effort from the beginning – has a long, detailed take that oozes the exhaustion and disappointment he no doubt feels, over at True North.   Go read the whole thing; it’ll be easier than copying and pasting the whole thing here.

A few takeaways, both McGrath’s and mine.

  • The anti-Amendment crowd outspent the proponents by a daunting margin.  Which is odd, considering that in every poll up to the very end, the measure was passing by a bare minimum of 3:2.  Now, polls are obviously a mess, in this state more than most.  But what could possibly cause a movement to spend that much money to thwart a measure so overwhelmingly supported by so many people, even – initially – DFL-identified voters?   Pure, simple love of the status quo?
  • The pro-Amendment forces were not only too small and too underfunded – they were fatally fractured, to the point that some pro-Amendment groups actually fought each other.  Precious time and money was wasted.  There was too little of both under even the right circumstances.
  • The movement started out with massive bipartisan support – and then turned the issue into a partisan one.  That might have worked in a year when the conservative/GOP brand was a big winner.  It was clearly not, this year – but the lesson remains; it was a huge mistake to make it a GOP vs. DFL issue; that did the DFL’s framing for them.  This should have been a “Justice versus Fraud” issue, repeated relentlessly and at every opportunity.
  • That failure made it easy for the DFL to tie it to the Marriage Amendment, and kill them both with their “Vote No Twice” campaign; it was elegant, and simple enough to drive into the heads of all the low-information voters that dominated this past election.

My prediction:  The DFL is going to build “safeguards” to fraud into the system in the next two years that it’d take a decade of conservative rule to untangle.  Look for voters to not be required to give names at the polls by 2014; by 2016, people will be picking up ballots at WalMart.  By 2018, they’ll come pre-filled from the DFL.

Facetious?  We’ll see.

Numbers, Part I: Lots Of Voters, Indeed

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Minnesota’s official line is that we’re very, very proud of the fact that more of our people jam into the polls on election day than any other state.

OK, so far so good.

So I thought – why not take a look at some previous years?

The blue line shows the total turnout – the percentage of elegible voters that turn out for elections in (respectively) 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006 (which is missing from the SOS website, and I didn’t want to extrapolate it, but you can assume it, like the other non-presidential years, is in the 50-70% range, for purposes of comparison), 2008, 2010 and last Tuesday.

The red line is the percentage of registered voters that vote.  It doesn’t seem counter intuitive; people who are registered to vote (and the numbers in every case are the “Registered as of 7AM on election day” numbers) are more likely to actually get down to the polls and pull the trigger.

Obvious pattern #1:  Presidential years are bigger for both figures.

But Monday, let’s look into where some of these numbers come from.

 

While Going About Your Business Tomorrow…

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…bring a camera.  A smartphone works just fine.  Be on the lookout for irregularities.

Reports are already filtering in from the U of M – students are being encouraged to double-vote (in their home districts and at the U).  It is a fact that the Democrats will cheat; they believe their ends justify their means.

So be watchful.  And report irregularities to the poll-watchers and the Minnesota Majority – don’t go taking the rules into your own hands; you could be wrong, and that’d be embarassing.

But keep an eye peeled.

Tinker Toy History

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The cover story in the Minnesota Bar Association’s Bench and Bar magazine this month is “Felony Disenfranchisement, Why 5 Million Americans Can’t Vote This November.” The cover art is a Black man in a jail cell. The authors are two criminal defense lawyers. The article raises all the usual DFL points but with one jarring note. Note this claim:

“Many believe felony disenfranchisement became a popular idea when it was clear the Constitution granted the right to vote to all of its citizens, regardless of race, since this was a method of preventing many blacks from voting. There is strong evidence, arguable rock-solid proof, that the laws were in fact intended to target and ultimately eliminate the black vote.”

And compare it with this complaint:

“Minnesota is not among the states that have made felony disenfranchisement laws less oppressive. In fact, Minnesota has not changed its law since it began disenfranchising felons in 1857.”

Now wait one minute. Minnesota was a territory in 1857, it didn’t become a state until 1858. The 15th Amendment was adopted in 1870, AFTER the North won the War. But felons were disenfranchised in Minnesota 10 years earlier. Early legislators somehow knew that one day the state would send men to fight in a War to gain independence for Blacks and that eventually we would need to lock up those same Blacks to take away their voting rights, so our prescient ancestors quickly adopted this law first!

Since that piece of “rock-solid” proof is obviously false on its face, the rest of the arguments in the article are so suspect as to be unpersuasive. I’d need a lot more convincing before I’d vote to overturn 150 years of unbroken precedent to give convicted felons more rights.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

The anti-Voter-ID movement started by pulling ever-growing “cost impacts”, to put it in the classical Latin, de anus.  Why would wholesale manufacturing of history be a stretch?

Collateral Damage

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Houston “Organizing For America” office closed and director fired after a James O’Keefe operative caught them actively abetting vote fraud disenfranchised the multiple-American community.

One down, many many many to go (including an episode in the video below where our friend Erin Haust visited the OFA office in Hopkins, MN):

And then maybe the Minnesota Office of the Secretary of State!