Attention Minnesotans Serving In The Military!

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. “So 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,” said Severson (see list attached at link). “And all of the data isn’t in yet.”

“After 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—most of whom were military voters—if they did not have a ballot application to accompany the ballot,” explained Severson.

Should I mention that active-duty military tends to vote pretty consistently around 70-80% Republican?

Yes.  We should:

“This technicality was so ridiculous that fixing it was among Legislature’s 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,” said Severson.

“When given the opportunity to help military voters and to count their votes, Ritchie went out of his way to have their ballots thrown out,” said Severson. “This was a travesty, and as a career Navy fighter pilot, I was appalled.”

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

Can we?  Before 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.  Everything; the mechanics, the laws, the chronology, the administrative and legal decisions that paved the way.  Let 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).

“What’s worse,” said Severson, “is that most of these voters probably have no idea that their ballots were rejected. That’s why I am circulating and publicizing this list. Absentee voters whose ballots were rejected by Ritchie deserve to know.”

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 writing in someone easily identifiable to me for one unopposed judge race.  I usually write in my cat Nose Marie, or my dog Clu.  That 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.

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

Of course, it’d be even better to trust our election system.

“Ritchie recently unveiled a website that allows voters to track their absentee ballots, to the point where the ballots are received, which is fine,” said Severson. “But what is missing is any kind of accountability for whether those ballots were actually counted, and, given Ritchie’s track record for disenfranchising our most vulnerable voters, that is where voters really need to be informed.”

While this blog doesn’t endorse candidates, I’m supporting Dan Severson.

Much more next week.

5 thoughts on “Attention Minnesotans Serving In The Military!

  1. As a military veteran myself, I can emphatically state that Mark Ritchie is a worthless piece of poo! His actions should be considered an act of treason.

    Unfortunately, VA did this in 2008, too. They disallowed thousands of ballots cast by service people on active duty overseas, claiming that they were late! When these people found out that their votes weren’t counted for that reason, they lashed back that the ballots were sent out late. Being that VA is a bastion of liberat syncophants, I will say with 99.999% certainty, that it was indeed by design.

  2. After 2000 and 2004, George Soros said he is getting liberal Democrats elected to Sec of State in swing states, to get Democrats elected. Soros said Ritchie is one of those he wanted to get in for that purpose.

    Looks like Soros was successful, both in getting his man in the office, and then getting at least one election called for the DFL.

  3. I just love the concerted effort of the MNGOP blogs to complain that Democratic candidates who are following the law, should break the law. I thought you were the law and order party. The current SoS is following the law. You don’t like the law, change the law, but don’t demand out of whole cloth that an elected official break the law to serve you purpose.

    Just like the Dayton Settlement tripe, you are demanding answers to questions he is, under force of law, ordered not to reveal due to standard confidentiality language.

    MNGOP = ‘The laws for thee, not for me” Nice!!

  4. Why, they can just demand a provisional ballot!
    The dems want anyone who walks into a polling place to get one of those at each polling place they visit.
    Guess you’re just screwed, though, if you are deployed.

    Flash, you guys lost all credibility re elections back in 2000 when “Count Every Vote!” Gore had his lawyers try to invalidate bags of military ballots without counting them first.

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