Pawlenty: I support Sara Taylor–style focus on voter registration fraud
Thursday, October 01, 2009 at 2:24 pm
- 9 Comments
WASHINGTON — On a Thursday morning conference call, I got a chance to ask Gov. Tim Pawlenty about voter registration, voter fraud, and his new PAC’s political adviser Sara Taylor. In the Bush administration, as a White House political director, Taylor got tangled in the scandal over the firing of U.S. attorneys who, the attorneys claim, were fired because they would not file lawsuits alleging voter registration fraud on the eve of the midterm elections. As a strategist for Bush’s campaigns, Taylor had “do not forward” letters sent to voters’ addresses to see if they bounced back, thus giving GOP poll watchers pretext for challenging their registrations — a process known as “caging.”
I asked Pawlenty whether he and his PAC would push for voter registration reform along the lines of Minnesota’s fairly straightforward process, which allows registration up to and including Election Day.
“One potential corrosion of our freedom and liberty is to have the democratic system, the election system, being undermined or becoming even partially fraudulent or lacking in credibility,” said Pawlenty. “We have electronic scanners in Minnesota. The ballots that were cast last time through the scanners were 99.9 or so percent accurate. There were no problems with them and the individuals who cast those ballots had to present themselves at a polling place in person and with at least some, you know, screens around identification and proper voting.”
Pawlenty went on to say that “all the problems in Minnesota in the Franken-Coleman [Senate] race related to the absentee ballot process.”
“I’ve been told that in 2006 there were 12,000 absentee ballots cast in our state,” said Pawlenty. “That’s a high number based on a historical number, so keep that in mind, 12,000 in 2006. In 2008, there were almost 300,000 absentee ballots cast in our state. Now this is a process where people are supposed to use absentee ballots because they’re unavailable in their voting area on Election Day because they’re out of the state, they’re on business travel, or they’re medically or physically unable to show up. So you can see in a presidential race, you know, an increase of say 10 percent or 20 percent or something like that from 2006. But what you saw is approaching this 3,000 percent increase, in absentee voting in Minnesota … obviously something very extraordinary occurred and what occurred is you had grassroots organizations come in here and use the absentee ballot process as a substitute for voting by mail. And, almost all of the problems … in the Franken-Coleman case come out of these absentee ballots.”
Pawlenty circled back to my question about whether his own state’s voter registration system should be a national model.
“Same-day registration in Minnesota would be fine if we had more stringent identification requirements,” he said, “specifically photo ID. We don’t require, and we should require in Minnesota, photo ID. So it’s not that the timing or the day of it is the problem. It’s making sure that we welcome any legal person who’s entitled to vote, to vote. We just need to make sure it’s appropriate. Now, we don’t have a history or tradition in Minnesota of a lot of voter fraud or these kinds of concerns but this Franken-Coleman experience, particularly as related to the absentee ballots, gives us pause. So, it’s not so much a same-day registration issue as it is making sure the registration, and the identification that goes along with it, is rigorous and appropriate.”
I told Pawlenty that I’d asked the question in the context of him hiring Sara Taylor to work for his campaign, and wondered whether he agreed with the priority she, and the Bush administration in general, placed on poring over voter rolls for alleged registration fraud.
“Absolutely,” Pawlenty said. “We should aggressively, at the state and federal level, enforce voter fraud concerns and to aggressively investigate and enforce voter fraud concerns. Because if we allow any corrosion to the integrity of the system, it calls into question the entire credibility of the results of the election and ultimately the pillars of the democracy. It is extraordinarily important. It goes to the core credibility and acceptance of our democratic system. And if people are going to question the outcome and say it was derived by fraud, as opposed to the will of the people, you’ve undermined a core tenet of democracy. It’s very concerning. Now, so to answer your question, we should make it a critical priority.”
9 Comments
Comment posted October 1, 2009 @ 10:22 pm
“Small Government” Timmy proposing we aggressively pursue the possible perception of registration fraud. Gee, T-Paw, wouldn’t that require a lot of government payroll and additional bureaucracies to accomplish? Yes, smaller government and controlling spending is what King Pawlenty is all about. What a fraud.
Comment posted October 1, 2009 @ 10:47 pm
Sara Taylor is a right-wing shill.
Maybe the governor will talk about this subject on his weekly WCCO segment, “Bend Over, Minnesota”.
Comment posted October 2, 2009 @ 9:37 am
Mr. Pawlenty takes on as an advisor Sara Taylor, who was at the center of the storm over the Bush Administration’s effort to turn the US Federal prosecutors into a partisan operation of the Republican party, undermining faith in the fairness of our judicial system.
And he fusses about a lot of absentee ballots, as though somehow that was some terrible problem. It was not. We had a close senate election in Minnesota because we were not of one mind about who should serve. It wasn’t about absentee ballots.
Sounds like Mr Pawlenty has concluded, like many Republicans, that they can’t win elections if everybody eligible to vote actually does, so they’re going to engage in their anti-patriotic, anti-democracy voter suppression tactics ala Florida 2000. Using police to set up road blocks in poor neighborhoods, hassling people; using private firms friendly to Republicans to “clean” voter registration records; using Secretaries of States as agents of the Republican party rather than elected officials responsible for the integrity of elections in the state, etc.
The more national Mr Pawlenty’s profile becomes, the less I admire him. He seems willing to trade his soul for that Republican nomination, and it’s not worth the price.
Comment posted October 2, 2009 @ 10:07 am
Big Tim has always been willing to trade his soul to advance his personal ambitions. This is nothing new. He was willing to stir up hatred toward gays and lesbians to get the Republican nomination for governor. He’s been willing to stir up hatred toward Indian tribes to get votes and raise revenues. Who knows who it will be tomorrow. Nobody is safe when he’s on the trail of something he wants. It’s evil and ugly.
Comment posted October 2, 2009 @ 10:24 am
Interesting. Governor Pawlenty signed the bill in 2006 banning the practice of caging.
linda higgins, senate author SF 3038 (passed in SF 2743, omnibus elections bill)
Comment posted October 2, 2009 @ 11:38 pm
here were 146,529 absentee ballots cast in Minnesota’s 2006 election. Not 12,000 as Governor Pawlenty states. There were even more (200,000+) absentees cast in 2004… the previous Presidential election. See the MN Secretary of State’s website here: http://www.sos.state.mn.us/index.aspx?page=452
Why doesn’t anyone in the media call him on his numbers as he tries to see fraud where there isn’t any? This is not the first time he has tossed out numbers that were off by a factor of 10 or even 100. In April 2008 he claimed that 20-30% of the money that the state collects for local governments is eaten up in bureaucracy. This was his rationalization for cutting back on local government aid. Less than 1% of the money goes to bureaucracy. I couldn’t find anyone at the State Capitol who had the slightest idea of what the Governor meant. After months of not returning my phone calls, I finally asked the Governor at a public press conference what he meant by that statistic. He said that he probably “misspoke”.
Comment posted October 3, 2009 @ 6:59 am
“Misspoke” is Republican for “lying and getting caught”. Pawlenty is showing his true colors here and it isn’t pretty.
First he makes up ridiculous statistics for affect. Compares the made up numbers in 06 (instead of 04) to the made up numbers in 08 (off by 1000%?) then he uses code words “grassroots organizations” to raise the specter of outside groups (ACORN anyone?) somehow manipulating the process which was overseen by thousands of local officials and a bunch of his own judicial appointments.
In fact the only groups that did significant absentee ballot work in the last election were the Democratic and Repulican parties…..oh and the Family Council.
And the “problem” with absentee balloting (it’s increasing demand) would be solved by early voting, which Pawlenty vetoed.
Why does Tim Pawlenty seem to hate Minnesota so much?
Comment posted October 4, 2009 @ 6:35 pm
The follow up to Pawlenty saying he thought Bush was right to go so hard after voter fraud: did he think to question his assumptions when the Bush DOJ found nothing over eight years?
Comment posted October 6, 2009 @ 5:40 pm
More evidence that our absentee governor is acting and speaking more like Bush. We know that TPaw has more brains than Bush (doesn’t take very much) so the inescapable conclusion is that Pawlenty is shaping his campaign to appeal to the same group of pea-brained bottom feeders that have come to define the current republican party. It’s rubbish and his appeal to false fears and nonsense issues is insulting to intelligent people and makes fools of believers in this tripe.
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