“We’re not really that worried about it,” McConnell tells the Minnesota Independent. He says the sample ballot postcards are only one of several methods the party uses for communicating its list of endorsed candidates. And for people who receive their ballots today, McConnell says, they’ll serve as reminders to go vote.

The U.S. Postal Service has a system of “red-tagging” time-sensitive political mail for priority handling, McConnell says. He’s not sure how many of the approximately 70,000 intended recipients in Minneapolis didn’t receive their sample ballots on time but says party staff are trying to track which zip codes were affected.

Besides endorsements, the sample ballot contains a brief how-to on ranking choices under the city’s new instant-runoff voting system.

Click on the image below to see the full-sized version of PiM’s chart in all its glory:

PiM is also home to a less visually stunning but still very handy chart listing gubernatorial candidates of both parties.

The man that the current mob of contenders hopes to replace, retiring Gov. Tim Pawlenty, is the subject of another great graphical-political achievement: Minnesota Public Radio’s “Governor’s Travels” map, which charts T-Paw’s itinerary as he criss-crosses the country in pursuit of the presidency. Here is MPR’s current map (green for official travel on state business, red for personal travel):

I can attest from personal experience that it’s not as easy as it looks. Here’s a graph showing how donations to former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman went up and down in relation (or not) to milestones in his recount-challenge effort:

Click to enlarge

Minneapolis City Hall. Photo: Wikipedia

A handful of financial reports from Minneapolis political committees and candidates remain as imaginary as the just-pretend primary election that made them mandatory more than two weeks ago.

The reports are supposed to let voters know who is putting money into political funds, how the committees are spending their money, and how much money they have on hand. The size of individual candidates’ purses is kept in check by donation limits, but greater quantities of unrestricted cash can go to political action committees (PACs) — about a dozen of which still haven’t filed.

Several of the PACs for which no reports are available have proven active and influential in the past. A group registered with the county as Parks Present Future (and chaired by Park Board President Tom Nordyke) successfully battled back a proposed city charter amendment this year that would have done away with the city’s quasi-independent park board. Treasurer Kari Dziedzic didn’t respond to messages about the group’s finances.

Another committee, People for Independent Parks (PIP), raised thousands of dollars from developers and donors outside the city to help elect a slate of candidates in 2005, including incumbent park commissioner Carol Kummer, who defeated challenger Jason Stone by 300 votes out of nearly 13,000 cast. The group didn’t register until after the 2005 primary, so the sources of its funding weren’t revealed until just before and after the general election.

PIP re-registered as an active committee early this year, but at that time there was to be no pre-primary reporting requirement; the first financial filing was set for just before the general election. Only after the Minneapolis City Council voted in June to set a faux primary for Sept. 15 (because instant-runoff voting makes a real primary unnecessary) did the earlier filing become required.

Financial reports can tell a lot about a political committee once they’re filed. A case in point in Citizens for Independent Parks (CIP). CIP led a petition drive to put a city charter amendment on the ballot that would give the park board greater taxing autonomy, then fought an ultimately unsuccessful court battle after the city council rejected the referendum as unconstitutional.

CIP’s pre-primary report (pdf) reveals that of $32,100 CIP raised, $20,000 came from park board attorney Brian Rice, and $1,700 from six other park board staff members. The Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis, another Rice client, donated $10,000, and a catering company that leases space at park board headquarters provided $1,500 worth of T-shirts.

Treasurer Patty Hillmeyer said the group hasn’t met to decide what to do with its money, but staffer Justin Fay tells the Minnesota Independent that most of the nearly $16,000 CIP reported having on hand as of Sept. 1 “has gone to pay for various overhead costs.” The group has 60 days from an adverse Sept. 10 ruling to file a planned appeal, according to Fay.

Nordyke and City Council Member Don Samuels are the biggest candidates still missing from Hennepin County’s online records. Nordyke’s treasurer said Tuesday she tried to file by email a week late but was sending a required hard copy, while Samuels’ treasurer didn’t respond to messages. Technical difficulties at the county also delayed some timely reports’ posting.

Delays of more than three days incur fines, since late filing robs the public of critical information about those who seek their trust. The problem is even more acute with pre-general campaign finance reports, which are supposed to be filed a mere week before the general election.

Minneapolis City Hall. Photo: Hennepin Co. Library

Although Minneapolis held no primary election this year, candidates for city office still had to file “pre-primary” campaign-finance reports under a new ordinance passed this summer. Yet for two weeks after the Sept. 8 deadline, confusion and other delays kept dozens of candidate and political committee reports from reaching the public.

The city’s adoption of instant-runoff voting (IRV) did away with the separate primary election in early September, long the traditional time for pre-primary finance reports that provide the public with its first peek into candidates’ campaign coffers.

So after the state Legislature took no action to resolve the matter, the Minneapolis City Council set a primary date of Sept. 15 for the sole purpose of triggering the pre-primary financial-report requirement.

The problem: In the meantime, candidates had been told there would be no financial filings until just before the Nov. 3 general election. Notices went out from both the city and Hennepin County election offices to alert candidates to the change.

Of the nearly 100 candidates who had filed for office, about a third are not registered with the county — a requirement only once a candidate raises or spends $100 — and don’t need to file financials. Most of the rest filed pre-primary reports more or less on time.

But as of Tuesday, two weeks after the deadline, the Minnesota Independent found that the county’s online records were missing pre-primary reports for at least a dozen Minneapolis campaign committees and a dozen more political-action committees (PACs). The financial wherewithal of incumbents like City Council Vice President Robert Lillegren and Park Board President Tom Nordyke remained a mystery.

Snafus and confusion

It turned out that a technical snafu had kept some reports out of the public eye. Filings by park board commissioners Bob Fine, Carol Kummer and Annie Young had been received, just not posted.

But the pre-primary deadline without an actual primary election proved a source of confusion for others.

Nordyke’s treasurer told MnIndy she’d mistakenly thought the deadline was Sept. 15, the date of the sham primary, and then tried to email her report. Veteran candidate Marcus Harcus, one of 10 three challengers to Mayor R.T. Rybak Council President Barb Johnson, also tried the not-yet-accepted method of filing electronically.

Others filed early and potentially incomplete reports. The Becker Volunteer Committee, working to re-elect Board of Estimate and Taxation Vice President Carol Becker, promptly completed and returned a report form that the county sent as a reminder in mid-August — well before Sept. 1, the final day of the reporting period.

“The notice was somewhat confusing to me,” treasurer Ted Becker wrote in an email to MnIndy. “I did not expect any [financial] activity between August 20 and September 1. However, I was mistaken.” The report from Ward 6 council candidate Michael Tupper’s campaign also appears to have been filed prematurely.

As of Wednesday, pre-primary financial reports remained missing online for at least four city candidates: Dick Franson, who is running for mayor; Charley Underwood, a Ward 12 council candidate; David Wheeler, a Board of Estimate and Taxation candidate; and Don Samuels, the Ward 5 council incumbent. County officials were double-checking records to ensure that all documents they have received are uploaded to the Web.

Late filers can face fines of $50 per day, up to $500, beginning four days after the deadline, according to Deb Bohler of the Hennepin County. Unexpected personal emergencies usually lead to waivers, whereas chronic tardiness increases the likelihood of a fine.

Of 26 PACs registered with the county as current in Minneapolis, pre-primary reports for only 14 are posted online. All are required to file, even if their bank accounts are empty or they’ve been inactive this year.

Unlike candidates’ campaigns, PACs aren’t sent information about filing rules in the first place, so they didn’t receive notice about the newly imposed pre-primary requirement. But they can keep up to date via the county website, Bohler said.

Not interested in making that kind of statement

State law also requires candidates for office in a “metropolitan governmental unit” to reveal financial details of a more personal nature, including occupation, employer, compensation, securities held, property owned, and money owed. But two people running for election in Minneapolis have so far refused to file a “Statement of Economic Interest,” according to the city clerk’s office.

James R. Everett, a Social Entrepreneurship mayoral candidate, tells MnIndy he doesn’t trust the police and other city powers-that-be with that information. “For my safety, I’m not playing by the rules,” Everett said.

Michael Cavlan, who is running as an Open Progressive candidate for city council in Ward 8, didn’t return a call from MnIndy told MnIndy he’d received an email threatening a $1,000 fine and was planning to visit City Hall on Friday, where he’d either settle up or take a principled stand against completing the form.

Gary Goldsmith, executive director of the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board, said cities or counties can report local candidates who don’t fill out an economic-interest statement to the board, which may impose a fine of as much as $1,000. Once elected, officeholders who don’t comply risk removal from office, he said.

Image: Minnesota Independent

Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s recently announced plans to axe state refunds for political contributions of $50 or less has set off an email stampede, as candidates urge donors to give before the program dies July 1.

In the $2.7 billion of unallotments he unveiled on Tuesday, Pawlenty included a complete cutoff of $10 million in state funding for the cash-back campaign donation program. The program has no official name in state law, but the state Department of Revenue calls it the Political Contribution Refund Program.

Republicans get more money through the program than their rivals, but Pawlenty still dissed it as welfare for politicians. On his WCCO-AM radio program this morning Pawlenty allowed, “It’s a nice program,” but he said it was a lower priority than schools and health care.

A growing number of candidates and both other major parties have jumped on the short-notice deadline to make pitches via the Internet for refundable donations. (UPDATE: Republicans, remarkably, have joined them.)

In a Web solicitation, Independence Party Chair Jack Uldrich characterized the cut as hacking off the IP’s arm.

Democrats have used less vivid imagery but are communicating urgency all the same, with email subject lines like “Time is running out,” “Just 14 days to  get your refund” and “Campaign Alert!”

In particular, those aiming to replace Pawlenty made sure to whack him as they made their appeals for fast cash. Here’s former State Sen. Steve Kelley:

By cutting off the Political Contribution Refund Program, Tim Pawlenty is impacting your voice in the governor’s race.  Over 90,000 Minnesotans use the PCR program annually to make a refundable contribution to the candidate of their choice. … Before the program expires, make a refundable $50 contribution (or $100 for couples) to a Governor who will put education first!

Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner was even more pointed in her email plea:

In addition to making cuts that will disproportionately affect the poor, children and the elderly, the Governor also proposed eliminating a program that helps ordinary Minnesotans participate financially in the campaigns of their choice. … While Tim Pawlenty and other Republicans can afford to run their campaigns with large donations from PACs and wealthy individuals, we would prefer to run ours with money donated from all levels of givers.

Gaertner had a ready metaphor for donors unfamiliar with the soon-to-be-eliminated program:  ”Think of your contribution as a temporary loan to the campaign.”

State Auditor Rebecca Otto, also a DFLer, curiously made a pitch for donations of as little as $5 rather than the maximum refundable amount of $50: “Can you afford to support my work with a monthly donation of $5, $10 or $15?” her email asked.

Gary Goldsmith, executive director of the state Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board, told the Minnesota Independent that his department doesn’t recognize pledges or plans as “contributions” under the refund program. He said donors or candidates with questions about the program’s phase-out should consult online memos from the campaign-finance board (pdf) and the Department of Revenue (pdf).

Pawlenty told his radio audience today that he’s heard more guff from legislators on the donation-refund program than any other unallotment item. Maybe that’s because it’s the one they can still do something about.

Here are some samples of appeals from candidates and parties, including those mentioned above plus state Rep. Paul Thissen and state Sen. John Marty (both gubernatorial candidates), and Secretary of State Mark Ritchie. Click on an image to enlarge. If you have seen or received other similar communications from candidates, please forward them to MnIndy.

Susan Gaertner

Steve Kelley

John Marty

Rebecca Otto

Mark Ritchie

Paul Thissen

Independence Party

DFL Party

Democrats won in 2008 due to their relative mastery of such “communication tools of the 21st century … despite our superior tickets and issues,” Coleman said last week.

Until today, YouTube documentation of Coleman’s remarks at the Conservative Heartland Leadership Conference in St. Louis last week was limited to two clips in which he extolled “the ethernet” as a new political tool and censored the word “shit” from a recitation of dialogue from the movie “City Slickers.”

Now comes Coleman’s full 30-minute keynote address to the traditional-values crowd, in three YouTube installments. Coleman addresses the “never-ending” contest with Al Franken in Part 1, Obama’s policies in Part 2, and the GOP’s tech-savvy gap in Part 3.

(A videographer who goes by the YouTube tag dsm0012 did yeoman service in handling an infant as well as a camera — evidenced by the gurgles and cries that punctuate Coleman’s speech. The sound of clattering cutlery in Part 1 dies down eventually, but Coleman’s casual New Yawk-by-way-of-Minnesota enunciation makes a full transcription of his remarks next to impossible.)

Here are the videos and some choice excerpts:

Part 1 of 3:

[Reciting his achievements as St. Paul mayor]  … Didn’t sign a proclamation making it  gay-lesbian-bisexual-transgender month in St. Paul. … I didn’t think it was government’s role to sign proclamations! (2:15)

[About the 2008 senate race] I have been counting and recounting my blessings. … There were 100-something votes, 110 votes for Franken, particularly in Minneapolis, that were double-votes. More votes than voters in those precincts. That shouldn’t happen in America. And so we got our case before the Supreme Court, arguments on Monday. I’m still very, very confident the Supreme Court comes to the conclusion that whether your vote counts shouldn’t depend on where you live. … They admittedly come from strong Republican areas. That’s because Democratic areas are already counted! So I’ve got 4,000 votes that we hope the court says, “Count the votes!” They count the votes, we’ll live with the outcome. We’re waiting, we’re waiting. I’m a man of great faith.  (4:50)

We are at the headwaters of something very powerful in this country. The first lines of the next chapter are being written at gatherings like this — and at tea parties. Connections being made among like-minded people all across America … (8:35)

Part 2 of 3:

By the way, we won the war in Iraq. (0:25)

[Listing Obama's flaws] … A foreign policy predicated on wanting to be liked rather than being respected. (1:25)

The president and his education friends say, ‘Let’s use our kids as guinea pigs in radical social experiments in our schools.’ (5:45)

Part 3 of 3:

We need to cultivate our grass e-roots. Grass e-roots. I heard a little bit about that discussed this morning. That’s spelled Grass-space-e-hyphen-roots. We have a new [unintelligible] in American politics called grass e-roots. In this new world, the one with the most cell phone numbers, e-mail addressses and YouTube hits wins. Despite the fact that we had superior tickets and issues in November, we never caught up on the Democrats on the ability to raise funds fast and cheap, and communicate with millions of people in milliseconds. Door-knocking and direct mailing still have a role but e-politics is the name of the game and we have to learn it. Facebook, Twitter, blogs, online social targeting. Conservatives need to manage the communication tools of the 21st century. …

[Describes Obama's grasp of high-tech] Imagine what we could do with similar technology, good leaders and ideas … People always say to me, ‘How do you win over the young people?’ I say, look at the generation today. Anybody with young kids today, I’ve got a 23-year-old, an 18-year-old daughter, 23-year-old son. Wherever they are, they control their universe. They’re masters of their universe. [They ] Facebook, [the?] MySpace. My daughter graduated from high school, she said, ‘Mom, you don’t have to write out invitations. But there’s something right here. I got all my friends right here.’ Course, we sent out invitations anyway. They want to travel, they don’t call a travel agent. They go on, what? Expedia or something else. And they figure it out themselves. When they want music, they don’t buy albums, they don’t buy 8-tracks, they probably don’t even buy CDs anymore. They’re picking out individual songs, one by one. Choice, controlling your destiny. (1:45)

With more and more papers — including these nine — calling for Norm Coleman to concede the U.S. Senate race, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee wants to capitalize on what its hopes is growing voter disenchantment with the drawn-out affair. The DSCC is seeking signatures on a petition for Coleman to step down and, as part of its appeal, has created an interactive timeline of ways Coleman has “obstructed” the process.

Starting with Coleman’s Nov. 5 statement that’d he’d “step back” if trailing in the vote count, the timeline runs through Monday’s filing of an appeal to the state Supreme Court. Peppered in between are key votes that Minnesota’s second senator missed due to the unresolved election, including the Mar. 10 passage of the Omnibus Appropriations Act and the Jan. 22 passage of the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

The DSCC is 5,000 signatures away from its goal of 100,000 people calling for Coleman to give it up.

Pawlenty’s debut on the social-media platform of the moment and an announcement of a retooling for Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s campaign Web site had political wags a-twitter about what he’s running for — a third term as governor in 2010, the Republican nomination for president in 2012, or both.

Despite the striking, Soviet look of Pawlenty’s red-black Twitter page, his message window initially had a legibility problem due to a lack of clash: white type on a white background.

Another interesting aspect of the governor’s Twitter page: He labels himself “TPAW” for what seems like the first time in public. But he forsakes what could have been a brilliant Twitter handle (”@tpaw”) for the more proletarian “@pawlenty.”

They’re wearing riot gear in London and they’re talking recounts in New York. It’s all so St. Paul, last fall.

St. Paul to London

Demonstrators, massed in the capital city to protest a gathering of people who wield political power, met police wielding riot-control weaponry. A bank’s windows were broken. Peaceful crowds were trapped by police moving in pincer formations.

It could have been the Republican National Convention (RNC), September 2008, in  St. Paul, Minn.. But it was the G20 Summit, April 2009, in London, England.

Differences: A man died in London after he collapsed in an area police had hemmed in. (Natural causes, one protester said; thrown bottles hampered police medics’ efforts, police said.) And the United States of America has a Bill of Rights that’s supposed to guarantee freedom of speech; England doesn’t.

Uncanny similarity: For their summit, the G20 leaders selected a London location that people call the ExCel Centre. The RNC took place at St. Paul’s Xcel Center.

Minnesota to New York

As Election Day turns into The Day After (and the day after that), the margin between two candidates dwindles to less than a half-percent of the total votes cast. Fundraising for a recount and charges of election-stealing ensue.

Sounds like the Minnesota U.S. Senate election, November 2008 — but it’s New York’s special congressional election, April 2009, where Democrat Scott Murphy leads Republican Jim Tedisco by a mere 25 votes.

Differences: New York doesn’t count its absentee ballots until after Election Day and gives overseas ballots an extra couple of weeks to arrive — leaving thousands of votes still to include in the canvass. (Minnesota counts all absentee ballots on Election Day and accepts none that arrive any later.) And President Obama made a last-minute robocall that could have made the difference with Election Day returns. (Candidate Obama made no such pitch for Franken.)

Uncanny similarity: The parallel universes are converging as Republicans fall back on discredited election-stealing charges from the Al Franken-Norm Coleman dispute to prime the cash pump for New York’s post-election drama. (Democrats, presumably slightly less prone to getting riled since they hold slim leads in both races, are so far making a more generic fundraising pitch in New York.)

Bruce Schneier (Wikipedia)

Norm Coleman’s attorney, Fritz Knaak, stated Thursday that the campaign had “a high degree of confidence” that the late-January exposure of its unprotected donor database didn’t result in the loss of sensitive data. A day earlier, Knaak initially leveled the claim, noting that Secret  Service investigators looking into the database breach “did not discover that any individual had been able to obtain confidential, personal financial information.”

But this week’s news that Wikileaks.org had obtained the 4.3 gigabyte database casts doubt on that statement — and so does Bruce Schneier, the Twin Cities-based technology expert dubbed a “security guru” by The Economist. Reached by phone at a Washington, D.C., technology conference late Thursday, Schneier characterized the campaign’s claim as “complete and utter bullshit.”

“It’s impossible to make that claim,” he said. “Either they misunderstood what the [Secret Service] said or they’re out-and-out lying. How can you determine the absence of something happening?”

The Secret Service has confirmed for the Minnesota Independent that an investigation is under way but said it couldn’t comment on ongoing cases.

Schneier said he didn’t know that IT professional Adria Richards had uncovered the security flaw with no advanced tools, but after learning it from the Minnesota Independent, he said of the Coleman campaign’s tech security: “It sounds like they didn’t have any, if what you’re saying is true. That seems pretty sloppy.”

He noted that it’s correct to call the exposure of the database a “breach,” as the campaign has done. “When someone who’s not authorized does it, we’d consider it a breach.”

But he wouldn’t call what Richards did — find and take a screen capture of an unprotected public Web directory — hacking.

“It’s not like it’s skilled hacking,” he said. “If I walk into an open door and steal a purse, am I cat burglar? … It’s not in the fine tradition of hacking because it took not a lot of skill. I wouldn’t use the term, but others might.”

He acknowledged that the law surrounding online security is “squirrely.” For instance, he said he’s unclear on whether viewing the unprotected Web directory where, for a few hours on Jan. 28, the directory existed could be considered a criminal act or whether this reporter could be prosecuted for clicking a direct link to the database that was left in comments in January at Minnesota Independent. (For the record, I didn’t download the file.)

“This law is still evolving, and some of it is really stupid,” he said. “People have been convicted for this. … It’s possible you would’ve been prosecuted.”

The exposure of the donor information, which included credit card numbers and three-digit security codes for them, is big news, he said, mainly because it involves a former U.S. senator who’s now locked in a political battle to regain his seat.

But he says such breaches — and mistakes about security for sensitive information — happen all the time.

“Companies do this, governments do this again and again and again,” he said. “While they definitely should know better, we’ve learned repeatedly that organizations don’t know better. It’s not, ‘Oh, God, look what they’ve done!’ It’s more: ‘Oh. It happened again.’”

“This couldn’ve happened to anybody – and it does.”