Three prominent elections bills are moving through the state legislature.

 

The first bill, SF2251 will move the primary to August to allow more time for military absentee ballots to be processed.

 

In 2008, nearly 10% of absentee ballots cast by military members serving overseas were rejected because they arrived too late to be counted. Moving the primary from September to August should provide the time needed to compensate for that travesty.

 

The bill isn’t controversial and has already passed the House and Senate by huge margins. Only 5 representatives voted against it and it was unanimous in the Senate. The Senate bill had minor differences with the house version, that look to have been resolved by an amendment in the House. The bill will probably be presented to the governor’s office today. All indications are that he will sign it into law. The Primary election will henceforth be held on the second Tuesday in August.

 

The second bill was passed out of the House government operations committee today by a unanimous vote. SF2622 / HF3111 is also relatively non-controversial. It codifies changes in the way absentee ballots will be handled and counted, establishing ballot boards to help ensure absentee ballots aren’t improperly rejected. The bill is likely to pass without much clamor and will likely be signed by the governor.

 

The third bill has it’s first hearing in the House government operations committee on Thursday at 8:30 AM. SF2388 / HF3108 could produce a couple squabbles. It’s an elections administration bill that toughens up requirements for voter list maintenance and verifications, and requires biannual reports to the legislature on critical election statistics, like the number of postal verification cards returned undeliverable after an election or random sampling of registered voters.

 

The bill also expands the scope of resources the secretary of state is mandated to utilize to verify voter records, including the federal Social Security Administration’s database of deceased people. It also provides for new checks against data maintained by the Departments of Corrections and Public Safety to flag ineligible felons and non-citizens who may have become registered to vote.

 

Another important aspect of this elections bill is that it codifies in law certain ballot reconciliation requirements to assure that all ballots are properly accounted for. Election judges will be required to count the ballots contained in a package when they are opened to verify that the count is correct (there are typically supposed to be 50 ballots in a package, but they are often not precise). Then, when the polls close, election judges will be required to account for every ballot received in the morning, reconciling with ballots cast, spoiled, duplicated and unused so all ballots at the end of the day tie out to the number of ballots received in the morning.

 

Minnesota Majority sued the Secretary of State’s office over the issue of reconciliation because following the 2008 election, it was found that as many as 40,000 ballots that were counted could not be accounted for in the Statewide Voter Registration System. In other words, there weren’t enough voter histories indicating people who voted in 2008 to account for all the ballots.

 

Examining precinct-level original election documents and manually counting signatures on roster pages and absentee ballots in three Ramsey County precincts revealed that the canvassing board somehow counted more ballots in all three examined precincts than there were voters who signed in. This issue appears to be widespread. There are over 4,000 precincts in Minnesota, so it should be apparent why this reconciliation process is so important. 

Under former Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer, an administrative rule was in place to ensure this reconciliation. Now Representative Kiffmeyer, a co-author of the elections administration bill claims that the first thing Secretary Mark Ritchie did on assuming office was to dismantle that reconciliation process. He claimed the counties did not like it because it was too much work, to which Representative Kiffmeyer responded, “before optical scanners, election judges used to have to hand-count every ballot, and often wouldn’t be out of the polling place until after three in the morning. Doing these checks isn’t so much work and it’s vital to ensuring the integrity of our elections.”

Representative Kiffmeyer makes a good point, but it’s still likely that Secretary of State Mark Ritchie will lobby and testify against this provision of the bill.

 

• Sign the Election Integrity Petition and instantly contact your elected officials about this important issue.