Voter’s saga shows the perils of absentee balloting

You’ve probably heard and read a lot about Minnesota voters whose absentee ballots got rejected and how those non-votes might affect the incredibly close U.S. Senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken.

But have you heard even one word yet from those voters?

“Oh, crap.”

Well, now you’ve heard two words.

Paula Guerra of St. Paul left for Utica, N.Y., on Oct. 11 to help her mother care for her ailing father. Her husband, Chris Farley, applied online to have Ramsey County send her an absentee ballot. It arrived two weeks before the election; Guerra mailed the ballot back the same day.

Then on Halloween, just four days before Election Day, Ramsey County returned Guerra’s ballot to her, unopened — rejected due to improper witnessing. Also included in the packet from the county were a new ballot and a page of instructions. “Oh, crap, I didn’t know this,” Guerra recalls thinking.

“There was a yellow sheet that they put in,” Guerra says. “It wasn’t in there the first time.”

The instructions explained that absentee voters who are out of state need to get their ballots signed by a notary public if no registered Minnesota voter is handy.

“I just had my sister sign as a witness,” Guerra said. Her sister is a New York resident. So this time Guerra got her mother-in-law, a notary public, to sign and stamp the ballot envelope.

“My God, you want to vote,” said the woman at the post office counter the next day, where Guerra paid a $15 overnight rate to send her second ballot back to Ramsey County.

It was supposed to arrive by Monday, or Tuesday morning, Election Day, at the latest.

“I’m really hoping it was counted,” Guerra says. “I wasn’t that concerned about Obama. It was for the Senate race. I knew it was going to be tight. It was on all the news shows.”

UPDATE: Guerra called Ramsey County after this post appeared to learn the status of her ballot. See this followup post. 

She said her ballot’s marked for Franken.

That instructions were missing from the first absentee ballot mailing appears to have been a mistake. The Ramsey County Elections office tells the Minnesota Independent that including the sheet is standard.

But Guerra and Farley say that her mishap might have been avoided had the ballot return envelope itself carried clearer directions. Another shortcoming they see, as Farley noted in a comment posted at MnIndy, is that the return envelope doesn’t provide space for a notary’s stamp and signature.

Ramsey County keeps records of rejected absentee ballots returned to voters, I was told today by an official who also invited Guerra to call to confirm her ballot was received and counted. Getting the names of absentee voters like Guerra who had ballots rejected but who may not have been as persistent — and may not have have been properly rejected in the first place — is the goal of a suit by the Franken campaign that was heard this morning in Ramsey County District Court, with the judge ruling in Franken’s favor this afternoon.

The story behind Guerra’s rejected absentee ballot demonstrates the difficulties that even well-intentioned and highly motivated voters can have from afar. Much of the recent debate over the Coleman-Franken U.S. Senate recount that commenced today in Minnesota has centered on whether the state will also examine absentee ballots to find (and count) any that local officials rejected improperly.

While voters’ intent on ballots that have been accepted is held sacred under Minnesota election law, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has made clear that the best intentions of rejected absentee voters to properly cast ballots are not. Absentee ballots that fail simple rules about signing, witnessing and mailing simply don’t get counted.

And while one problem appears to be the lack of a mechanism to promptly remedy improper rejections, Paula Guerra’s case suggests another problem: following absentee voting rules isn’t made as simple as it should be.