{"id":14374,"date":"2010-10-15T11:59:38","date_gmt":"2010-10-15T16:59:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=14374"},"modified":"2010-10-15T10:17:31","modified_gmt":"2010-10-15T15:17:31","slug":"attention-minnesotans-serving-in-the-military","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=14374","title":{"rendered":"Attention Minnesotans Serving In The Military!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Minnesota thanks you for your service…<\/p>\n

…by whizzing on your electoral franchise<\/a>:<\/p>\n

State Representative Dan Severson, candidate for Secretary of State, today alerted military absentee voters of disenfranchisement by the Minnesota Secretary of State in the 2008 election. \u201cSo far, I have identified about 80 overseas absentee voters from various counties across the state whose ballots from 2008 were rejected on a ridiculous technicality by Secretary of State Mark Ritchie,\u201d said Severson (see list attached at link). \u201cAnd all of the data isn\u2019t in yet.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter the 2008 election and during the subsequent U.S. Senate recount, Ritchie sent a memo (see attached) to county election officials instructing them to reject the absentee ballots of overseas voters\u2014most of whom were military voters\u2014if they did not have a ballot application to accompany the ballot,\u201d explained Severson.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Should I mention that active-duty military tends to vote pretty consistently around 70-80% Republican?<\/p>\n

Yes. \u00a0We should:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis technicality was so ridiculous that fixing it was among Legislature\u2019s first actions in the last legislative session so that similar disenfranchisement could not take place again in 2010 or any future election overseen by an anti-military, voter-negative secretary of state like Mark Ritchie,\u201d said Severson.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen given the opportunity to help military voters and to count their votes, Ritchie went out of his way to have their ballots thrown out,\u201d said Severson. \u201cThis was a travesty, and as a career Navy fighter pilot, I was appalled.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Minnesota’s establishment has been chanting “our election system is the best in the nation” for so long, people believe it. \u00a0And in a sense, it is <\/em>the best – if by “best” you mean “most efficient at getting names put into registration books and ballots into the system”. \u00a0 But getting everyone <\/em>to the polls is a worthless metric if we can’t trust the integrity, or even understand the machinery, of our election system.<\/p>\n

Can we? \u00a0Before you answer that, do this: go out in the street, and ask 1,000 Minnesotans to explain, correctly, how the 2008 Senate Race went from a 200-vote Coleman win to a 300-vote Franken win. \u00a0Everything; the mechanics, the laws, the chronology, the administrative and legal decisions that paved the way. \u00a0Let me know if you find one out of those 1,000 who can recite the whole thing (presuming you, yourself, can. And I’ll bet you can’t).<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s worse,\u201d said Severson, \u201cis that most of these voters probably have no idea that their ballots were rejected. That\u2019s why I am circulating and publicizing this list. Absentee voters whose ballots were rejected by Ritchie deserve to know.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Note to any Minnesotans serving who haven’t yet filled out ballots, or who will be doing it all again in 2012; I make a point of\u00a0writing in someone easily identifiable to me<\/a> for one unopposed judge race. \u00a0I usually write in my cat Nose Marie, or my dog Clu. \u00a0That way, I can check with the election authorities afterwards; if they don’t turn up in the counts, then you know your vote got “lost” somewhere along the way.<\/p>\n

It’s sneaky, but then when you live in a one-party city, you have to be more clever than your overlords.<\/p>\n

Of course, it’d be even better to\u00a0trust our election system<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cRitchie recently unveiled a website that allows voters to track their absentee ballots, to the point where the ballots are received, which is fine,\u201d said Severson. \u201cBut what is missing is any kind of accountability for whether those ballots were actually counted, and, given Ritchie\u2019s track record for disenfranchising our most vulnerable voters, that is where voters really need to be informed.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While this blog doesn’t endorse candidates, I’m supporting Dan Severson.<\/p>\n

Much more next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Minnesota thanks you for your service… …by whizzing on your electoral franchise: State Representative Dan Severson, candidate for Secretary of State, today alerted military absentee voters of disenfranchisement by the Minnesota Secretary of State in the 2008 election. \u201cSo far, I have identified about 80 overseas absentee voters from various counties across the state whose […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14374"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14381,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14374\/revisions\/14381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}