How can you tell when a Republican is lying? In new media terms it's when they type something on their keyboard. The Fightin' 101st keyboard wing of the Minnesota Republican Party, Minnesota Democrats Exposed, is at it again. This time they are spreading a lie that MN Secretary of State Mark Ritchie was Al Franken's guest at the State of the Union.
I personally know this to be a lie because I am going to be talking to Franni Franken about her experience at the SOTU. Aaron Landry has the scoop:
The Minnesota GOP has been shopping around the lie that Mark Ritchie was Al Franken's "guest" at the State of the Union last night. Of course, it's completely false. That doesn't stop Luke Hellier, however:
He links to this piece with the Politico which says:
Did Michael Brodkorb call someone at Politico trying to plant this lie? Was it Luke Hellier?
Politico is not known for it's responsible journalism. They are perfectly happy citing single anonymous sources if the news is breathless enough.
Will Luke Hellier have 2nd or 3rd degree burns from his pants catching on fire?
Republican activists and party leaders have tried to paint a crosshairs on Ritchie's back since his near-landslide election in 2006, but he nevertheless earned widespread praise for his handling of the long, contentious recount battle between Norm Coleman and now-Senator Al Franken last year and this year.
Minnesota Majority is a right wing group that purports to be for voting reform among other things. Their motto is "standing together for traditional values." In their view, traditional values must include stupidity and conspiracy theories based upon moronic logic.
They filed a lawsuit because they are unwilling to accept that Al Franken won the MN-SEN race. They claim that 40,000 votes weren't counted. The MN Supreme Court refused to hear their case. You'd think that'd end it ... smacked down by the Supremes usually ends things. But not these clowns.
The conservative coalition that filed suit in May against Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and 31 county auditors is accusing the Minnesota Supreme Court of dismissing the lawsuit Thursday to spare itself "the embarrassment of having to acknowledge major election system problems after just issuing its decision in the (Norm Coleman-Al Franken) contest."
...
"Here you have a major U.S. Senate race being decided by just a few hundred votes, and along comes our case citing the fact that the secretary of state has been unable to account for tens of thousands of voters in the 2008 election," Minnesota Majority president Jeff Davis said in a statement. "You can see why the court might not want to touch this case with a 10-foot pole."
I love it when Republicans engage in moronic logic. Dissection after the fold.
Minnesota's latest Baghdad Bob impersonator, MN Republican party chair Tony Sutton, will be running attack ads on the radio against Secretary of State Mark Ritchie. After all the rave reviews that Ritchie got for how he conducted this last election, overseeing the massive undertaking that was the recount, FEC Tony thinks Ritchie is vulnerable.
The state GOP is buying radio ad time for the next week to criticize the record of Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a first-term Democrat. Chairman Tony Sutton claims Ritchie failed to properly train local election officials and switched his position on absentee ballots during the recent Senate recount. Sutton says he thinks Ritchie is vulnerable and he's been talking to several potential candidates. Sutton says the party will also work to unseat the DFL attorney general and state auditor.
(Polinaut)
Maybe FEC Tony is picking up right where Ron Carey left off. Maybe FEC Tony has a chance of living up to legacy that Carey left the Republicans when he abandoned ship. He still has a lot of work left to do if he's going to fail that badly.
Minnesota Majority, a right wing Republican group founded by former Minnesota Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer, is at it again. Kiffmeyer became infamous for insisting that election judges display posters warning of terrorists in polling places on election day 2004 when she was the MN SoS. Minnesota Majority have lived up to their founder's incompetence.
Plaintiffs in the suit are Minnesota Majority, Jeff Davis, Dan McGrath, Jean Sanford, David Fitzsimmons, Representatives Matt Dean, Tom Emmer and Mark Buesgens and Senators Warren Limmer and David Senjem.
The lawsuit is based upon research recently conducted by Minnesota Majority. We compared the Minnesota Statewide Voter Registration System (SVRS) to the official 2008 State Canvassing Board Report (SCBR) and discovered a discrepancy of over 400,000 votes. Further investigation revealed that voter history updates have not been posted in over 800 precincts spanning 25 counties. Both the SVRS and the SCBR were provided by the Minnesota Secretary of State's office. In late April, Bert Black, legal counsel to Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, told Minnesota Majority that SVRS voter history updates pertaining to the 2008 general election had been completed by all counties, but the data on the SVRS disk provided showed that not to be the case.
Kiffmeyer, Emmer, Davis and the rest of these clowns have repeatedly attacked Minnesota's election system shrieking "The SkY Is Falling! Vote Fraud! The SkY Is Falling! Vote Fraud! The SkY Is Falling! Vote Fraud!" without ever proving a single instance of vote fraud. Their solution to this non-existent problem is to push through Voter ID bills.
Their real intent is vote suppression.
Maybe after this lawsuit is thrown out, we could all meet and I'd be glad to buy them all a steaming hot cup of Shut the **** Up.
Did you listen? Did you hear Joe, TwoPutt and me on The Mark Heaney Show? Stop back around next Tuesday for the MP3 if you missed it and want to listen in.
On April 30th, DFL SD-42 will be hosting a celebration at the Hopkins VFW in honor of the accomplishments during President Obama's first one hundred days. Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, State Representative Maria Ruud (SD42-A) and DFL Chair Brian Melendez are featured guests. It's fitting this celebration will be held at a VFW - Democratic lawmakers have consistently and committedly strove to honor and serve veterans. The VFW's National Commander recently applauded President Obama for President Obama's vision for a 21st century Department of Veterans Affairs.
I'm especially proud this celebration will be held at the the George R. Wolff VFW Post 425, where I'm a member. Both of my grandfathers served in World War 1; Gandpa Nels was in Europe the day the Armistice was signed. My father in law served on a sub in the south pacific; the USS Grenadier. He pulled five war patrols and rotated off the ship - on the very next war patrol, the sub was captured by the Japanese. From the USS Genadier's website:
On April 30th, DFL SD-42 will be hosting a celebration at the Hopkins VFW in honor of the accomplishments during President Obama's first one hundred days. Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, State Representative Maria Ruud (SD42-A) and DFL Chair Brian Melendez are featured guests. It's fitting this celebration will be held at a VFW - Democratic lawmakers have consistently and committedly strove to honor and serve veterans. The VFW's National Commander recently applauded President Obama for President Obama's vision for a 21st century Department of Veterans Affairs.
I'm especially proud this celebration will be held at the the George R. Wolff VFW Post 425, where I'm a member. Both of my grandfathers served in World War 1; Gandpa Nels was in Europe the day the Armistice was signed. My father in law served on a sub in the south pacific; the USS Grenadier. He pulled five war patrols and rotated off the ship - on the very next war patrol, the sub was captured by the Japanese. From the USS Genadier's website:
This is a cross post from my blog MinnesotaBrown.com, the only blog with global perspective and Iron Range sensibility.
Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie headlines a civil liberty conference Wednesday, April 8, at Itasca Community College in Grand Rapids. Ritchie's nonpartisan address about the importance of free and fair elections will come 24 hours after today's court ordered counting of just under 400 more U.S. Senate ballots now deemed admissible. As most of you know by now, Franken expanded his lead in the final count, winning the election by 312 votes.
Ritchie has received widespread bipartisan accolades for the way he handled Minnesota's complicated and frustrating U.S. Senate race between Coleman and Franken. Though the legal process allowed under Minnesota's "be extra, extra sure" election law could yet drag out for some time, the counting and the due process were expertly and fairly observed by Ritchie. Now people have a chance to ask him questions and hear his perspective on how this news story fits into the common American value of free and fair elections. And, for upstaters like me, it's nice to see some of this discussion move to northern Minnesota.
The conference starts at 9 a.m. at ICC and will feature numerous presenters and a forum involving representatives of local political parties explaining their perspective on top civil liberties issues. Ritchie's presentation is at 2 p.m. Wednesday at the college theater. The conference is a nonpartisan event that will explore many aspects of civil liberties, from human rights to personal freedoms. The event is free and open to the public.
Local DFLers are holding a 3:30 p.m. reception for Ritchie at the Itasca County DFL headquarters on Highway 169.
(Disclosure: I am a central committee director for the Itasca County DFL but write this independently).
One might be surprised to learn that there are other statewide races coming up in 2010 -- terms for Attorney General, Secretary of State, and State Auditor are all up at the same time as Governor/Lt. Gov. are up.
So what's in store? As long as those offices' current occupants still like their jobs, the likely answer is "not much."
Many ideas were presented today by Mark Ritchie, Minnesota Secretary of State. The list is behind the fold. To me the single greatest improvement, not on the list, would be
Make the Tuesday General Election day a holiday!
I hate the idea of an electronic election book. It leaves us as vulnerable to electronic loss or programmed changing of data. Right now when an electronic outage happens we can continue voting. An electronic outage happened during the last election, near my house, due to a car accident. An electronic outage with an electronic book would STOP voting. That is unacceptable. Right now several lines with several books are set up. I can just see the computer problems that hold up everything. Which brings me to my next rule:
Keep paper ballots and paper processing, so we can vote in the middle of electronic outage or snowstorm and no one can mess with our votes.
Moving the primary to an earlier date will be the most controversial proposal.
I am worried about that this proposal
• OSS ensures that only eligible Minnesotans are registered to vote by checking government databases including: courts, Department of Corrections, Department of Public Safety, and Social Security Administration.
I think that this has be done 6 months in advance with two notices sent to the voter, so the voter can basically fix any problems. Right now people like me with four names would be disenfranchised because some government cannot hold my legal name, and there is a name mismatch. Minnesota is less vulnerable since I could simply re-register on election day. Florida and other states have used this process to prevent many valid voters from voting.
Trent England of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation spreads lies and insinuations about the Minnesota Senate race in Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal today. Mr. England is from Olympia, WA and is still bitter over losing the 2004 recount in WA Governor's race.
Four years ago in Washington, Democratic Party candidate Christine Gregoire lost the first count, lost the recount, and then won a second, highly dubious recount by 133 votes. In Minnesota, where Sen. Norm Coleman is defending his seat against comedian-turned-candidate Al Franken, the first count showed Mr. Coleman up 725 votes. Today, thanks to another dubious recount, Mr. Franken is apparently in the lead.
(WSJ)
The Evergreen Freedom Foundation is a right wing "think tank" funded by the typical right wing sources. Read more about the Evergreen Freedom Foundation here.
Mr. England lies about lost ballots, ballot security, ACORN and Mark Ritchie. He spews some vague accusations that seem to be directed toward Ritchie. Read on for the details...
Overlooked in the hoopla about improperly rejected absentee ballots is the large number of properly rejected absentee ballots that appear to have been rejected for nothing more than what I would consider bureaucratic reasons. Using the results from precincts that have completed their sorting we see that almost 75% of the rejected absentee ballots, the combination of piles 2 and 5, were rejected for bureaucratic or clerical reasons.
Here is a visual description of Minnesota's absentee ballot process for those not familiar with it and a look at the different reasons for an absentee ballot to be rejected.
(Thanks Tony -- great information to remember when the furious spin starts tomorrow. - promoted by Joe Bodell)
Things will start to get interesting again in the Senate recount on Friday. That's when the Canvassing Board will meet to decide on the fate of rejected absentee ballots as well as figure out what to do about the 133 missing ballots in ward 3, precinct 1. Also up in the air, the 12 uncounted absentee ballots from Hennepin county found during the search for those 133 missing ballots. Hey, we're not Florida, we just visit in winter.
What to do with the pile of improperly rejected absentee ballots will prove the most consequential decision. It seems likely, as there is precedent for it, that the election night machine results will be used in place of the 133 missing ballots in Hennepin County. As for the 12 uncounted absentee ballots, if they're counted the most votes either candidate could realistically hope to net from those would be 3 or 4. If the candidates garner the same support as they did in Hennepin County as a whole (using election night results) Franken would gain 6 votes, Coleman 4.3 and Barkley 1.5, for a net Franken gain of 1.7 votes.
As you'll recall Secretary of State Ritchie asked all of the election officials to sort through rejected absentee ballots and divide them into five piles, with the so called fifth pile representing absentee ballots that were mistakenly rejected. Right now the Star Tribune is reporting that election officials have found 244 improperly rejected absentee ballots, with only 14 of the 87 counties done sorting. However some counties aren't sorting at all.
Ramsey County Elections Manager Joe Mansky had this to say about why his county had decided against sorting absentee ballots:
"(Our) advice is, we probably need some direction from a court."
Michael Brodkorb, the subject of a recent post on the front page here at MNCR, has done it again. In his latest post, Brodkorb slams Mark Ritchie for sending out a message to his mailing list providing details on an opportunity to see a rare copy of the Declaration of Independence on display right here in Minnesota. Brodkorb's post:
Secretary of State Mark Ritchie's campaign committee recently sent out an e-mail announcing that an original printing on the Declaration of Independence was coming to Minnesota. The e-mail contained a link to Ritchie's campaign website, which provides an opportunity for people to contribute to his campaign committee.
Just so we are clear, "non-partisan" Secretary of State Mark Ritchie used an appearance of an original printing of the Declaration of Independence to fundraise for his campaign.
This guy has no shame.
That does sound bad, and since I had read Michael's post before Ritchie's email, I jumped to that conclusion based solely on Michael's outraged post. Looking through my email archives, I expected to find a very offensive email from Ritchie, something like this: "The Declaration of Independence is coming to Minnesota -- Thanks to me! Show your appreciation by donating $25, $50, or whatever amount you can afford by clicking HERE!"
As someone very familiar with Brodkorb's style, I should have known better.
Did Michael Brodkorb call someone at Politico trying to plant this lie? Was it Luke Hellier?
