Posted: 07/16/10 14:48, Edited: 07/16/10 16:19
by Dave Mindeman
OK - One more point about this "felons voting" thing and I promise to stop talking about it. Trouble is, the GOP is going to continue to push this "road to nowhere" because of politics not election integrity.
Ramsy County election official Joe Mansky offered an explanation that sounds entirely rational. A number of felons may have taken the risk of voting in 2008 for a chance to vote for Obama and the historic significance of it. Mansky furthur speculated that a lot of them probably didn't offer a vote on any other race. Good point but good points are lost on this topic.
What irritates me today is the last part of the letter that Tony Sutton, chair of the state GOP, is sending out to all 87 county attorney offices:
Every felon who voted illegally during the 2008 election canceled out the vote of a law-abiding Minnesotan. I appreciate the labor intensive nature of such investigative work but believe Minnesotans deserve real answers and solutions to the very real problem of voter fraud. Public confidence in our elections system is essential to our democracy. While there will always be a cloud over the 2008 election, we must get to the bottom of the extent to which illegal voter fraud occurred. Moving forward, we must have answers to ensure that this kind of fraud does not take place in the future. Minnesotans deserve no less.
I placed emphasis on a couple of phrases because it points to the hypocrisy of this whole issue. Here we have the GOP harping about saving the taxpayer's money on every front they can bring up - yet this "frivolous" investigation will cost local taxpayers potentially millions. This will be labor intensive work because each individual will have to tracked down and interviewed. Time will be taken away from prosecutions of more severe crimes. Resources will be utilized that are getting more scarce because of budget cuts. And yet, Mr. Sutton wants those resources used for a partisan witch hunt.
Maybe he will offer to pay for the investigation with GOP funds? Hmmmm?
And I will agree with Mr. Sutton that public confidence in our election system is essential.
However, taking a close election and conjuring up every potential problem is not a way to do this. In particular, this "felon voting" investigation can change nothing or accomplish nothing, it can only cost us money. We can't extract secret felon votes out of the system..... just as we cannot extract mistaken ballots out of the system either.
Coleman's court challenge validly brought out the point that some absentee ballots were erroneously included just as there were some absentee ballots that were erroneously rejected. Mistakes like that will happen and all we can do is correct what is available to correct. The court acknowledged the problem but ruled that every election will have some measure of these type of errors and that once ballots are counted there is no way to pull them back.
Under normal election cirumstances a small margin of error is not considered a problem -- in an extremely close election, errors can be argued about endlessly.
The 2008 election was incredibly close. We examined the votes for mistakes that could be corrected. We examined the system to be sure the laws were followed as best as temporary volunteer workers could do it. And we had a court contest to bring disputes in front a panel of judges.
This issue is bogus. The attacks on Mr. Ritchie are bogus. And the cost to the taxpayers is unwarranted.
The bottom line is that the Minnesota GOP is only concerned about politics. It's that simple.
UPDATE: Further proof. Pawlenty vetoed a bill that would have given the SOS access to potential felony voters.
