{"id":18655,"date":"2011-03-09T12:30:21","date_gmt":"2011-03-09T18:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=18655"},"modified":"2011-10-12T13:00:58","modified_gmt":"2011-10-12T18:00:58","slug":"crow-wing-county-update","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=18655","title":{"rendered":"Crow Wing County: Update"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been pretty quiet about the Crow Wing County story that I covered last fall, around election-day<\/a>.\u00a0 Part of it has been that I’ve been too swamped with family and new job stuff to spend a lot of time trying to track down county officials and everyone else involved with the story. And part of it is that there have been other developments that just plain needed time to work out.<\/p>\n

Which isn’t to say I haven’t done a little digging around.\u00a0 I just haven’t written about it a lot.<\/p>\n

In the original videos<\/a>, taken the Saturday before election day, Monty Jensen – a disabled Army veteran who vigorously disclaims any history of\u00a0 significant political activism – recounted his story; he and his girlfriend went to the Crow Wing County Courthouse to get absentee ballots (they both work and go to school in the Twin Cities, and wouldn’t be able to vote on election day).\u00a0 They claimed to have seen a group of mentally-handicapped group home residents being herded through the Crow Wing County courthouse, and to have seen the group home’s staffers filling out the clients’ ballots for them – a clear violation of state law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Jensen filed an affadavit on Election Day with Crow Wing County attorney Don Ryan.\u00a0 The County Sheriff’s office carried out an investigation.\u00a0 Ryan declined to prosecute; a source in the county courthouse speaking off the record said that Ryan acted under the discretion that Minnesota Statute 201.275 <\/a>grants him.\u00a0 There are questions about both the discretion – Ron Kaus is demanding a special prosecutor – and the investigation, which went as far as to interrogate Monty Jensen’s long-estranged father, but did not interview the second witness to the original incident, Jensen’s girlfriend.<\/p>\n

When the story came out, there were three primary responses from the media and leftyblogs (other than the\u00a0 usual “balderdash, our election system is the best in the nation hic <\/em>best in the nation hic <\/em>best in the nation…”):<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. “The Minnesota GOP is trying to disenfranchise the disabled<\/strong>!”:\u00a0 This was an odd strawman; not only is Monty Jensen himself disabled, he’s restated endlessly that his only concern is the exploitation <\/em>of the disabled; the use of the disabled as warm bodies to cast other peoples’ votes.\u00a0 Which, Jensen has steadfastly claimed, was his singular concern.\u00a0 Notwithstanding, Lynn Peterson – owner of the Clark Lake group of group homes, from which the residents in question allegedly came – went on a media spree, vigorously upholding the right of disabled people who have not been declared incompetent <\/em>to vote, a right that nobody involved in this case has questioned in any way.<\/li>\n
  2. “Monty Jenson is a liar!<\/strong>“: Someone needs to tell Crow Wing County Attorney Don Ryan, who told a Crow Wing County Commission meeting in December that Jensen’s concerns were valid, and the sort of thing a good citizen should <\/em>do.<\/li>\n
  3. “The times just don’t add up!<\/strong>“:\u00a0 There’s no way that Jensen’s complaint could be legitimate, say some, because the times in the various accounts – Jensen’s and the management at Clark Lake – don’t jibe.\u00a0\u00a0 But all it will take to scupper that claim is one <\/em>Clark Lake resident to have been registered to vote, who had been declared incompetent.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    And that resident has materialized.\u00a0 James Stene, a man who suffered serious brain trauma after a near-drowning incident while he was trying to rescue his sister, and who has been judged legally incompetent – claims to have been dragged through the voting process by his staff member.\u00a0 And he – and his father, Al – made the claim at last night’s Crow Wing County Commission meeting:<\/p>\n

    There are, of course, lots of new developments to this story.<\/p>\n

    Eric Shawn of Fox News was in Brainerd over the weekend shooting a story about the allegations of voting fraud in Crow Wing County this past election (previous stories here<\/a>; the first in the series was this post<\/a>).\u00a0 The piece should air sometime in the next 3-4 days.<\/p>\n

    And we’ll be having Monty Jensen, Al Stene and Ron Kaus of the Minnesota Freedom Council on the Northern Alliance Radio Network this Saturday at 2PM.\u00a0 Hope you can tune in.<\/p>\n

    CORRECTIONS: Stene, not Steen.\u00a0 And I had originally listed Ryan in one place as a Crow Wing County Commissioner; that’s been corrected as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I’ve been pretty quiet about the Crow Wing County story that I covered last fall, around election-day.\u00a0 Part of it has been that I’ve been too swamped with family and new job stuff to spend a lot of time trying to track down county officials and everyone else involved with the story. And part of […]<\/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":[158,157],"class_list":["post-18655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-election-integrity","tag-crow-wing-county","tag-vote-fraud"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18655","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=18655"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18694,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18655\/revisions\/18694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}