• Attend the Kill the Bill Rally – Saturday, March 13^th at noon on the State Capitol Lawn
• Keep up the heat – Click here for additional action steps
• Make a personal visit to the office of your members of Congress. See here for location of your representative's office

After an initial veto threat sent the House and Senate approved bonding bill into legislative limbo, the Governor met with Democrat leaders and began negotiations. A deal was eventually struck. The sticking point appeared to be funding the governor wants for expansions to the Moose Lake sex offender treatment facility. The legislature left that out of the bill they passed, prompting the governor’s veto threat.

 

The bill has been referred back to a conference committee, where, the governor’s demands are being met in part, in order to stave off a veto of the entire bill. Pawlenty will likely instead use the line item veto authority to trim the bonding bill down to around $750 million, leaving in his pet projects. $47.5 million has been approved for the Moose Lake facility. The Governor’s not yet said which spending items he will cut.

 

Election Administration Bill is an Example of the Art of the Possible

HF3108 is an elections administration bill aimed at strengthening the integrity of Minnesota’s election system, mostly through “back end” administrative procedures. The bill will require new verifications to be performed on voter registration records, including checks against the Social Security Administration’s lists of deceased individuals and Department of Corrections data on felony convictions. It also strengthens and better defines a required check of voter records against Department of Public Safety data to ensure non-citizens are not allowed to register to vote.

The bill was approved by the House Government Operations Commitee on Thursday, March 4th.

The bill will also establish new reporting requirements, so that the legislature will be regularly informed of the state of the election system and anomalies that may arise. For example, when a new voter registers, a Postal Verification Card is mailed to the voter’s registered address. If the post card is returned as undeliverable, that voter will be flagged for challenge at the next election, but lists or even counts of returned PVC cards are not routinely revealed. HF3108 will require a biennial report of returned PVC cards to the legislature. This will provide insight into how many new registrations can not be verified. 

The bill also cleans up some unusual data handling procedures that previously muddied the waters of the Statewide Voter Registration System, making it difficult to forensically determine exactly who voted in past elections.

 

Toward the ends of transparency and integrity, this bill represents a good first step. More reforms will still be needed (especially a photo ID requirement), but in the committee hearing in which the bill was approved, Representative Kiffmeyer, a Republican co-author of the bill observed that politics is the art of the possible. This bill’s chief author was Representative Winkler, a Democrat and it was the product of bipartisan meetings on election issues. This is what was possible at the time.

 

Though Several election officials attended the committee hearing, such as Ramsey County Elections Director, Joe Mansky and The Head of Elections for the secretary of state’s office, Michelle Desjardin, none testified for or against the bill. Minnesota Majority testified in favor of the bill.

 

The bill was passed out of the House State and Local Government Operations Reform, Technology and Elections Committee on an overwhelming voice vote. There were one or muttered two “no” votes. 

• Sign the Election Integrity Petition
• Contact your legislators and tell them to support HF3108 and SF2388

Up Next:

Senator Gerlach has introduced an elections bill (SF2888) that would eliminate vouching and elimiate student IDs as acceptable forms of identification. It also creates provisions for provisional ballots so a person apearing at the polls without proper ID can still vote and have their vote counted if they provide proof of identity and residence within 10 days after the election.

Gerlach's bill will have a hearing in the Senate Government Operations and Oversight Comittee on Monday, March 8th at 3:00 PM, Room 123 State Capitol.

Congress Prepares to Go Nuclear on Health Care

On Wednesday, President Obama held a press conference in which he arrogantly declared that the time for debate is over on health care 'reform'. The president surrounded himself with people in white lab coats in an attempt to legitimize his message.  But in reality, it was difficult to keep track of the number of false and misleading statements the president made over the course of his speech. 

One fact was made crystal clear: Democrats plan to go it alone without Republican support.  Now that they no longer have a 60-vote majority in the Senate, they plan to change the rules of the game and employ a parliamentary trick known as "reconciliation" or the “nuclear option.” Usually reserved for budget bills, the maneuver would allow the Senate to pass this massive bill with only 51 votes instead of the normal 60-vote super-majority required for all major legislation. This trick would require the House to pass and amend the Senate version of the health care bill, with an understanding in the senate that the House can get what it wants in the conference committee. After the conference committee, the newly re-minted bill would be submitted back to the House and Senate for a final vote. Passage would require a simple majority in each body.

 

President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Schumer, Senator Reid, Senator Feinstein, and other Democrats claimed bypassing the 60-vote filibuster rule in the Senate would tear down the fabric of the republic and change the Senate forever. They said the suggestion by Republicans in 2005 to change the rules to stop Democrat filibustering of presidential nominees was a naked, arrogant power grab and un-American. Now that they can’t get their way playing by the rules, the “nuclear option” is seen as their noble duty. See here for a video compilation of Democrats protesting the “nuclear option” in 2005.

 

Every major poll shows that the American people oppose ObamaCare and want Congress to start from scratch.  But President Obama and his colleagues in Congress don't appear to be getting the message.

 

See here for a detailed explanation of the health care situation and real solutions.

 

• Send a free personalized fax to your members of Congress, demanding they oppose ObamaCare or suffer the consequences next election.
• Attend the Kill the Bill Rally on Saturday, March 13th

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.

Following the governor’s veto of a bill to restore $170 million in funding to the essentially defunct General Assistance Medical Care program, Democrats in the Senate voted to override. No Republicans joined in the vote.

The override attempt in the House was not successful. A 2/3 vote in the House was needed, which would have required 3 Republicans to vote for the override. None did so. The effort failed by a party-line vote of 86-47.

GAMC funding is slated to run out in April, when the governor plans to move all enrollees to the less generous Minnesota Care program. Minnesota Care is more similar to the traditional private health care plans most Minnesotans utilize and costs the state’s taxpayers far less per enrollee.

GAMC directly paid for 100% of all medical and dental care for the enrollee with unlimited coverage. The cost of the program has been skyrocketing, growing by 36% annually and it was clearly unsustainable.

The governor did the right thing for the state of Minnesota by vetoing the attempt to resurrect the bankrupt program. To be sure, beneficiaries of the extraordinarily generous program will protest the loss of their entitlement, but the approximately 30,000 enrollees aren’t being left high and dry by any stretch. Minnesota Care will provide them the same level of insurance coverage any privately insured worker has access to.

The demise of GAMC will mean one less bureaucracy for the state to maintain, and save the state money in direct payments and administration. Three additional medical assistance programs still remain. One could hope that they will eventually all be merged into one cost-effective program for even greater efficiency later.

Take Action: Contact your legislators and tell them what you think of their vote.

 

The governor has announced that he will veto the bonding bill in it’s entirety, but House Speaker Kelliher may have one last trick up her sleeve. She said she intends to send the bill back to the Senate for “further consideration.” This is simply a stalling tactic to buy time to pressure the governor into negotiations.

 

After a conference committee reached agreement on the $1 billion bonding bill, reconciling minor differences between the House and Senate versions, the House took up the final bill for a vote after 7:30 last night, passing it 85-46. Eight Republicans who’d voted to pass the initial bill withdrew their support. 

Republican Representatives Bud Nornes (10A), Paul Anderson (13A), Greg Davids (31B), Jim Abeler (48B), Tony Cornish (24B), Tom Hackbarth (48A), Mary Liz Holberg (36A) and Torrey Westrom (11A) changed their votes on the bonding bill to no. Democrats Bill Hilty (8A) and Al Juhnke (13B) also had a change of heart, withdrawing their support for the bill.

Representative Paul Kohls (34A) was home recovering from a concussion when the bonding bill first passed. When he returned to work, he added another "no" vote to repassage of the bonding bill.

The Senate took up the amended bill after 9:00 PM and also passed it, but again, some Republicans changed their votes from yes to no. The final vote in the Senate was 47-19.

Republican senators Bill Ingebrigtsen (11), Joe Gimse (13), Gen Olson (33), Pat Pariseau (36), Mike Jungbbauer (48), and Julie Rosen (24) changed their votes from yes to no. Democrat Tony Lourey (8) also changed his vote to no.

It looks like the bonding bill debate isn’t over yet. How long Speaker Kelliher can keep the bonding bill from the governor’s awaiting veto pen is uncertain. The best case scenario for the taxpayers is no bonding bill at all, but Governor Pawlenty has indicated willingness to sign a bonding bill in the $750 million-range if it includes certain items he considers priorities, like the Moose Lake Sex Offender facility and Vermillion State Park. If legislators rework the bill toward those ends, the governor may still approve more borrowing this session.

Click here to see all new House votes.

Click here to see all new Senate votes.
Read the Conference Committee Engrossment
New Forgetful Fifteen Six Flyer

 

• Contact your elected officials and express your opinion on the billion-dollar bonding bill.
• Call the Governor's Office Toll Free at 1-877-37-VETO-IT (877-378-3864). Tell the governor there should be no bonding bill this session unless the deficit is solved first.

 

Both the Minnesota House and the Senate have passed similar versions of a bonding bill equaling about $1 billion in general obligation bonding. In the House, Speaker Kelliher pushed the bill through without allowing debate.

 

Right now, minor differences between the two bills are being reconciled in a conference committee.

 

Minnesota is already in debt over $7 billion. Making the payments on that borrowed money consumes over 3% of the state’s biennial budget, and we’re running a deficit of over $1.2 billion this year, with deficits projected to be over $5.4 billion in the next biennium. This means we can’t afford to make the debt payments we are already obligated to make. Taking on more debt in a financial crisis like this, one might think the money must be for something pretty important. Some of the money is for worthy projects like improvements to public facilities, but these improvements can wait and there is absolutely no excuse for some of the appropriations. Legislators in the conference committee have decided a criminal sex offender facility in Moose Lake isn’t important enough to borrow money for this year, but they will use the taxpayer’s maxed-out credit card for:

This bill will probably emerge from conference committee today. The governor will have three days to veto or sign the bill.

Take Action: Call Governor Pawlenty right now at (toll free) 1-877-378-3864 to urge him to veto the bonding bill. Tell him we have to solve our current budget crisis before we borrow any more money.

• Click here to see how your state representative voted on the bonding bill.
• Click here to see how your state senator voted on the bonding bill.

Update: Governor Pawlenty has issued a statement, saying he intends to veto the entire bonding bill.

 

Citing the state’s current $1.2 billion biennial budget deficit (not even mentioning the looming deficit of over $5 billion in the next biennium), Pawlenty told legislators that the state can’t afford the $170 million appropriated by the GAMC bill. “This legislation utilizes $170 million that I previously identified in my supplemental budget to help resolve the current $1.2 billion deficit. Those same dollars cannot be used twice,” he explained in his veto letter.

 

Indeed, legislators seem to have failed to consider where the money was going to come from and according to the governor, they did not address GAMC’s fundamental cost structure problems.

 

The bill initially passed 45-20 in the Senate, but after conference committee, the vote was 47-16. The House passed it by a huge margin, the vote being 125-9. All 87 DFL representatives voted in the affirmative and only 9 Republicans voted no. Dissenting votes were cast by Representatives Bruce Anderson, Mark Buesgens, Steve Drazkowski, Tom Emmer, Tom Hackbarth, Mary Liz Holberg, Paul Kohls, Dan Severson and Ron Shimanski.

 

With these margins, a veto override looks like a distinct possibility. If Republicans who voted for the bill will now stand with the governor’s veto, the override will not happen. Democrats in the House will need the support of at least three Republicans to prevail. 

House Minority Leader, Kurt Zellers is confident that the Republicans will stick together and sustain the veto. Zellers said he thinks any GAMC solution should be part of a comprehensive budget solution package that addresses the current deficit as a whole. “This should be a part of it, the GAMC fix or a new program should be a part of that fix. We're going to work together again, just like we did with this version of it to find a solution that not only the governor can agree to but the house and senate can agree to as well,” he explained.

It should be noted that recipients of GAMC are not being thrown off of public medical assistance. Current GAMC enrollees are scheduled to be moved onto the more cost-effective Minnesota Care program on April 1st. It's not as generous, but it will provide medical insurance on par with the private plans most Minnesotans utilize - at a far lower cost to the taxpayers.

Click here to read an excellent Op-Ed by Senator Julianne Ortman: The State Can't Afford GAMC. 

Take Action: Contact your elected officials and tell them to go back to the drawing board on GAMC and uphold the governor’s veto of SF2168.

NEW! Click here to Download the Forgetful 41 Flyer

Some people find voting on Election Day to inconvenient to make the effort - How much should we accommodate everyone's individual whim, at what price?

Last year, Governor Pawlenty vetoed an omnibus elections provision bill that would have made some pretty radical changes in the way elections are conducted in Minnesota. Our system is in need of an overhaul, but the bill passed on an entirely party line vote by Democrats in the legislature last year was the opposite of what’s needed. 

There were some good points in the bill, but it’s overall effect was to loosen up an already very liberal and trusting election system.

 

One element of the bill was early voting. The proposal would have opened up elections to a one-week window instead of holding elections on a single day. Minnesota Majority objected to the plan for several reasons.

 

While we think voting is a civic duty and want to encourage every eligible voter to get informed and exercise their right, we also don’t believe that the integrity of our elections should take a back seat to convenience. Convenience is really the only argument in favor of early voting, but there are many compelling reasons to reject it.

 

On Election Day, citizen oversight is a critical process to instilling confidence in the fairness of the process. Trained citizen election judges administer the ballots and report results, while volunteers from the political parties are permitted to observe the process. With early voting, both of these safeguards and guarantees of transparency are impossible. We could never find and pay enough citizen election judges to take a week off work to administer 7 days of voting, so we would have to rely entirely on election bureaucrats to collect and count ballots. Likewise, volunteer poll watchers from the political parties would no longer be viable. Who can afford to take a week off work to watch municipal election offices all day, day in and day out?

 

Right now, the potential for abuse of our permissive election system is somewhat minimized by time constraints. A person intent on fraud could only do so much damage, traveling from precinct to precinct attempting to cast multiple ballots, because of the time constraints. Allowing in-person ballots with no ID requirement for an entire week opens the window for fraud alarmingly wide.

 

On Monday, the state Senate Committee on State and Local Government Operations and Oversight held a discussion on early voting. Senator Katie Sieben arranged for four people to testify in favor of enacting early voting in Minnesota. Two were citizens who had received a phone call from either the Franken or Coleman campaign informing them that their absentee ballot had been rejected.

 

Tami Carpenter of Plymouth was told her ballot was rejected because the signature on her absentee ballot didn’t match her application. Dennis Hansen of Woodbury wasn’t given a reason. They said their absentee ballots were wrongly rejected. Without examining the absentee ballots in question, it’s impossible to know why election judges rejected the ballots, but rejected ballots were gone over with a fine-tooth comb during the Coleman-Franken recount.

 

They asserted early voting would reduce the number of absentee ballots, save time money and prevent confusion. Mr. Hansen noted that had he been able to vote early in person instead of mailing in his absentee ballot, any errors would have been caught and corrected right away, thereby ensuring his vote was counted.

 

What Mr. Hansen apparently doesn’t know, and Senator Sieben failed to mention is that Absentee ballots can already be cast in person at municipal election offices, with help from election staff. The solution being sought already exists.

 

Laura Fredrick-Wang of the League of Women Voters also testified before the committee. She said that current absentee voting laws “compel people to misstate their reason for voting absentee,” because some people who want to vote absentee don’t fall under one of the 4 legally defined acceptable reasons. Essentially, this argument is that the laws established to prevent abuse of the absentee voting privilege force people to commit voter fraud.

 

Fredrick-Wang went on to say that the requirement to state one of four reasons to vote absentee create a “necessary barrier” to voting. She cited examples of people who may not know for sure whether they’d be in, or pregnant women who could wind up in the hospital delivering a baby on Election Day.

 

Senator Gerlach countered by reading the statute on absentee ballots, pointing out that those circumstances are already provided for in the law, under the “reasonable expectation” language.

 

Fredrick-Wang responded that it doesn’t matter if those situations are covered by the acceptable excuses for absentee voting, saying, “it’s just easier to vote early than to vote absentee.”

 

At that point, Senator Gerlach had an “ah-ha” moment. “So this isn’t really about barriers to voting. I’m disappointed. You stared out talking about absolute barriers but now you are saying it’s really just about convenience. While I’m all for making things convenient – we shouldn’t erect needless obstacles to voting – we have to balance convenience with confidence in the outcome of elections. Confidence, in my view has to take precedence.”

 

Senator Gerlach is right. Minnesota already enjoys the nation’s highest level of voter participation. There’s no need to further simplify voting at the potential expense of integrity.

 

While all citizens have the right to vote, there is not necessarily a right to absentee ballots, but our society has decided to create the privilege as a convenience. We are already taking the step of accommodating people who choose to be out of the country on Election Day, the obvious exception being military service, where a person could be deployed overseas and have no other choice but to be absent on Election Day. We certainly have no obligation to change the date of an election to accommodate certain individuals preferences.

 

Early voting creates a host of potential issues, like the afore mentioned larger window for abuse and the elimination of citizen oversight of voting. In addition, circumstances change. When Senator Wellstone was unexpectedly killed in a plane crash during the campaign, new ballots had to be hastily created for Election Day. If early voting had been allowed, the people who cast votes for Wellstone in advance of the election would have wasted their ballots in the Senate race. With everyone voting on the same day, we all have access to the same information before casting a ballot and in the case of Absentee ballots, they can be overridden by a subsequent absentee or in-person ballot. Early voting would not accommodate that circumstance.