KSTP, MPR: Emmer missed-votes ad ‘essentially accurate’

Two fact-checks done by local news outlets find that the Alliance for a Better Minnesota’s newest ad, which claims “Tom Emmer missed one out of every five votes in the state legislature,” is accurate — with caveats.

The ad, which documents its research at the site missedvotes.com, states that Emmer missed 20 percent of votes, or “142 missed votes in 2010 alone. Votes on education, veterans’ affairs, and jobs.”

“The Alliance for a Better Minnesota gets its numbers right,” reports MPR’s Poligraph, later concluding that “most of those votes were indeed on significant issues facing the state, including education funding, taxes and the environment.”

But it offers this context:

This year’s session lasted a little over 14 weeks, and Emmer missed votes on 15 of those days. So, that’s roughly equivalent to one day for every week the legislature met. However, he was present for some votes on eight of those days. Furthermore, Emmer missed most of those votes on a few days clustered at the end of the session; he did not take one day off every week for the entire session as the ad implies. Emmer’s campaign manager Cullen Sheehan didn’t say where he was on those days, only that he takes his job “very seriously.”

KSTP’s Tom Hauser’s fact-check found the ad to be “attention grabbing and for the most part accurate. However, it’s also misleading.”

It’s true, says Hauser, that Emmer went from missing 4 percent of votes in 2009 to 23 percent of votes this year. But viewers should note, he adds, that other gubernatorial contenders, including Margaret Anderson Kelliher and Rep. Paul Thissen, missed a higher percentage of votes compare to the previous year. (Kelliher went from 4 percent in 2009 to 11 percent this year; Thissen went from 5 to 13 percent — both still well below Emmer’s House-leading missed-vote rate.)

Hauser also takes issue with the ad’s narrator, who asks, “What would happen if you missed one out of every five days of work for a year?”

That’s misleading, because it incorrectly equates one vote for one day of work; the Minnesota Legislature sometimes has multiple votes on a given day.

Over six years as a U.S. Senator, Hauser says in closing, Mark Dayton missed 3 percent of votes.

KSTP is owned by Hubbard Broadcasting, which donated $100,000 to MN Forward, the conservative PAC that has produced ads supporting Emmer (Hauser gave that ad a B+ grade).