…so I have pretty much held my counsel on Monday’s SCOM decision on Tom Emmer’s request for reconciliation.<\/p>\n
Joe Doakes – of Saint Paul’s Como Park neighborhood – is<\/em>, in fact, a laywer.\u00a0 And he’s got an opinion.\u00a0 I’ll be adding emphasis:<\/p>\n [Monday], the Minnesota Supreme Court issued its opinion explaining why it denied Emmer\u2019s request to have the number of ballots cast verified against the number of eligible voters before the vote totals were certified by the State.<\/p>\n Refresher: a prospective voters goes to the first table at the polling place to sign the roster; then he gets a receipt and takes it to the second table where the receipt is exchanged for a ballot; then he marks the ballot and deposits it in the ballot box. At the end of the night, all three are counted \u2013 number of eligible voters who signed the roster, number of receipts given, and number of ballots in the box.<\/p>\n The Court said: \u201c . . . the legislative intent appears to be to design a process that would guard against more ballots being counted than eligible voters voting.\u201d<\/p>\n Yes, exactly right. Only eligible voters should be able to vote.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So far, so good.<\/p>\n The Court said: \u201cPetitioner has not shown how counting voter\u2019s receipts, which are given to voters only after they have signed the polling place roster and which constitute proof of the voter\u2019s right to vote [citation omitted] is inconsistent with this legislative intent.\u201d<\/p>\n Well, duh. That should be obvious. If the signature-receipt-ballot system worked perfectly every time, we wouldn\u2019t need triple-entry bookkeeping to weed out cheaters<\/strong>. But if 100 people signed the book as eligible voters and 110 receipts and ballots appear in the boxes, there\u2019s no way to know who put the extra receipts and ballots in the boxes. Presumably they were NOT deposited by eligible voters or the vote totals would match the signatures; therefore, the statute requires election officials to throw out excess ballots. It\u2019s precisely because we don\u2019t trust the system to work perfectly that we build in safeguards<\/strong>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It’s here that the problems start:<\/p>\n The Court said: \u201cIn responses filed to the petition, certain local election officials appear to have conceded that they are not removing excess ballots . . . The validity of this practice was not raised in the petition and has not been fully presented to this court. Therefore, this issue is not before us, and we do not discuss it further.\u201d<\/p>\n And sure enough, the system did NOT work perfectly. There were indeed more ballots cast than eligible voters, precisely the problem the legislature intended to address. Voting fraud does exist. If we\u2019re to fulfill the legislature\u2019s intent, we ought to order the counters to toss out those excess ballots before certifying the results.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Of course, the intent of the legislature gets filtered through whomever runs <\/em>the legislature…<\/p>\n And finally, \u201cOur review . . . establishes that the legislature intends the processes [for removing excess ballots] to be based on either the number of signatures on polling place rosters or on the number of voters receipts.\u201d<\/p>\n Whaaat? How\u2019d you reach that conclusion? We admit there\u2019s a problem, it\u2019s precisely the problem the legislature intended to address with its triple-entry bookkeeping system, but now you\u2019re saying the legislature intended us to ignore it? Now it\u2019s okay to skip the first step in the security check, the one step that proves the fraudulent origin of those excess votes?<\/p>\n If you\u2019re only going to count receipts and ballots \u2013 no matter how they got into the box – then what\u2019s the point of proving voter eligibility?<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n How can disarming the security system be consistent with the intent of maintaining a security system?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It makes no sense – as a stand-alone decision.<\/p>\n As a bit of legalistic buck-passing, though…:<\/p>\n This opinion makes no sense to me. The fact it\u2019s unanimous means either the entire Court understood something about the law that I simply can\u2019t grasp; or they wanted no part of another election lawsuit and kicked the case out on the flimsiest imaginable grounds, knowing the real solution is for the legislature to rework and clean up the election law through the political process. I\u2019m betting on the latter.<\/p>\n Joe Doakes, Como Park<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So there you go, Legislature.\u00a0 Tear it up!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" …so I have pretty much held my counsel on Monday’s SCOM decision on Tom Emmer’s request for reconciliation. Joe Doakes – of Saint Paul’s Como Park neighborhood – is, in fact, a laywer.\u00a0 And he’s got an opinion.\u00a0 I’ll be adding emphasis: [Monday], the Minnesota Supreme Court issued its opinion explaining why it denied Emmer\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16048","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-election-integrity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16048","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=16048"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16048\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16088,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16048\/revisions\/16088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16048"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16048"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16048"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}