If you have any questions on where, when or how to vote, the League of Women Voters has information on how to register to vote, where to vote in your local area, what to bring to the polling place and all the relevant laws governing the process at Vote411.org.

In St. Paul, Tuesday’s election signals the city’s first use of ranked choice voting, which allows voters to pick a second choice that will be counted if the voter’s first choice is eliminated (more information on ranked voting is available at the Ramsey County election center).

Wherever you are in the state, if you run into any problems at the polling places tomorrow—long lines, not enough ballots, partisan attempts to intimidate voters—we encourage you to report that news to the world by using the Twitter hashtag #votingproblems and by emailing the Minnesota Independent at tips@minnesotaindependent.com.

Source: Flickr, Titanus

The 2011 merger of Comcast and NBC-Universal created one of the largest media conglomerates in American history, which critics warn could limit the variety of voices heard by the public and threaten the internet’s role as a forum for free exchange of information.

While many corporations seek to influence the decisions made by the government with the double whammy of campaign donations and lobbyists, Comcast pursued this strategy on what one consumer advocate described as a “grander scale.”

“Comcast did a sophisticated, well-designed, expensive lobbying campaign and it touched all the right buttons. It played its hands very well—I give them credit for using their political clout effectively,” said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior vice president of the Media Access Project, which campaigned against the merger. ”But the real scandal about the political process is what is legal; it’s that Comcast didn’t have to break any laws in order to get its way.”

Birth of one of the world’s largest media conglomerates
The likelihood of a Comcast and NBC-Universal merger was first reported in September 2009. It drew outrage from a spate of public advocates, including Minnesota U.S. Sen. Al Franken, who said the merger would lead to fewer options for the public.

“I am convinced that without significant changes to protect consumers, merging a company who provides programming and one who provides the pipes that carry said programming would be a raw deal for Minnesotans and independent content producers alike,” Franken wrote on his blog in February 2010.

Franken also rightly predicted that pressure would come from private interests over the merger deal.

“Fights like this one are more than worth having, they’re essential to preserving the fabric of our democracy,” Franken wrote. “I know full well that by taking positions like this, I’m inviting special interest groups to spend a lot of money to defeat me down the road. That’s OK by me—because corporations getting their way isn’t some bad medicine Americans need to swallow—we can stand, fight and win if we work together.”

A spokesperson for Comcast declined to answer answer any questions related to the company’s political activity.

But according to the company’s statement on political and trade activity, Comcast uses public policy advocacy, lobbying, political contributions and involvement in third party organizations to act on public policy issues of concern to the company: ”The political and trade association activities of the Company are directed to influencing the wide variety of public policy issues that impact the company’s business.”

That sort of activity can be expensive. Comcast has dumped tens of millions of dollars into the political system in the last decade, according to Federal Election Commission documents. Comcast has pumped more money into its political and lobbyist spending every year since 2001.

“There’s always an element of risk and gambling involved when it comes to influence peddling on Capitol Hill, what lobbyists and special interest groups and corporations do is make the odds the best they can in their favor,” said Craig Holman of Public Citizen. ”It’s all designed to buy influence and it usually does work. But not always.”

Pulling the strings of those who pull the strings
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, was responsible for considering the Comcast and NBC-Universal merger.

Putting pressure on an appointed group of commissioners like the FCC isn’t actually that different from pressuring Congress.

“As a matter of fact, it can be harder for the public to trace,” Holman said. “It’s quite difficult to analyze, much of the lobbying activity for instance when it comes to working with FCC commissioners or others like that doesn’t get reported, it very frequently is not disclosed as lobbying activity.”

Comcast spent more than $75 million on federal lobbyists alone in the last ten years, with much of that sum coming in recent years, according to Federal Election Commission records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Last year alone, during which much of the merger process took place, the company employed 109 federal lobbyists and lobbied both houses of Congress and the FCC.

The money a company spends on lobbying is important, Holman said, but even more important is the amount of money they can stuff into political campaigns.

“Besides direct campaign contributions, which are traceable from PACs, they will do bundling activity, which is very difficult to trace, and in many cases untraceable,” Holman said. “They will also now with Citizens United do direct corporate expenditures through third party groups, which are entirely untraceable, but their lobbyists will be on the Hill letting the lawmakers know what they’re doing with their money.”

While waiting on FCC approval of the merger in the 2010 election cycle, Comcast upped the amount of money they were directly donating through their political action committee, spending $3.5 million on political campaigns (favoring Democrats).

“There can also be the direct campaign contributor factor to any lawmakers, they can pull the strings of members of Congress and get members of Congress to apply pressure on FCC commissioners to vote a certain way on various issues, and they do,” Holman said. “The agency regulations are every bit as important as lawmaking, every lobbyist worth his or her salt knows that.”

Members of the Federal Communications Commission are appointed by the president and approved by the Senate. But Congress isn’t completely powerless in regards to the FCC, as recent Republican Senate disapproval of the FCC’s stance on net neutrality shows.

In a January letter to the FCC about the Comcast merger, Reps. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and Lee Terry (R-Neb.) condemned the “heavy-handed tactics of an overreaching FCC” and threatened that they will be “examining whether changes in the FCC’s transaction review process are needed as we exercise congressional oversight in the weeks to come.”

In fact, 88 of 97 members of Congress who sent a January letter urging immediate passage of the Comcast merger had received money from Comcast’s political action committee, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

In through the revolving door
By law, there’s never more than three members of one political party on the FCC, which can lead to partisanship around close issues.

“Even though FCC commissioners are not elected officials, many of them are exceedingly loyal to the elected officials who appointed them or who are responsible for them getting their appointments, they tend to be very partisan,” Holman said. “They’re made very aware as to who the big players are on Capitol Hill.”

The FCC voted 4-1 in January 2011 to approve the Comcast and NBC-Universal merger with some conditions, eliciting an outraged reaction from Franken: ”The Commission is supposed to protect the public interest, not corporate interests. But what we see today is an effort by the FCC to appease the very companies it’s charged with regulating.”

It was only a few months after the decision to approve the merger that Comcast hired FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, who supported the merger, was hired as the new Comcast vice president for government affairs, what’s known in Capitol circles as the “revolving door.”

“It had the appearance of something that was problematic, but I don’t have any evidence,” Schwartzman said. ”You just don’t know the impact this kind of lobbying actually has or not, but the cumulative effect is pretty clear.”

Although the company pumped millions of dollars into the political system around the time the merger was being considered, the new Comcast saw a total revenue of $14.3 billion in just the second financial quarter of 2011.

A conservative PAC aligned with U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann’s presidential bid is targeting Texas Gov. Rick Perry on immigration in a spate of radio ads starting Tuesday in South Carolina.

The ads by Keep Conservatives United (KCU) paint Perry as being soft on illegal immigration and says “illegals take jobs.”

The radio ads supplement two television ads that have been running in the state in support of Bachmann since mid-August.

“The ad shows voters in next year’s critical South Carolina primary the clear differences between Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry on illegal immigration,” Bob Harris of KCU said in a statement on the website. “It will reach a politically attuned audience for a week to build support for Bachmann.”

The PAC has been airing two television ads targeting Perry. One targets his spending:

Another ad accuses Perry of embracing President Bush:

Bachmann, of course, has been the target of ads that poke fun at her embrace of President Bush:

Findings by the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board show that the National Organization for Marriage spent $709,000 on radio and television ads during the gubernatorial campaign in 2010. Those ads targeted DFLer Mark Dayton and Independence Party candidate Tom Horner for their support for marriage equality and lent support for the campaign of Republican Tom Emmer who supported a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage.

The ads, paid for by the New Jersey-based NOM were created by the California-based Schubert Flint Public Affairs.

The ads were the subject of a campaign finance complaint that was dismissed Wednesday by the public disclosure board. The decision by the board provides some insight into the ad campaigns and how much was spent.

The first ad, “Your Right to Vote,” his television airwaves from May 18 to May 26 and cost $212,716:

A radio ad called “Who Should Decide?” ran from Aug. 12 to Aug. 20 at a cost of $96,050:

“The Most Important Civil Right,” aired on Minnesota television stations from Sept. 20 to Oct. 24 at a cost of $333,155:

Just before the election, from Oct. 13 to Oct. 24, the radio ad “The Most Important Civil Right” ran for a cost of $62,549:

The group also spent $4,700 in literature at the Minnesota State Fair.

According to the board’s findings, NOM paid Schubert Flint Public Affairs to create the ad campaigns. Schubert Flint was also behind the campaign in California to pass Prop 8, which halted marriage equality in 2008. Same-sex couples were granted the right to marry in that state in early 2008.

Frank Schubert and Jeff Flint discussed their strategy in a February 2009 interview with Campaigns and Elections magazine and in that interview the two laid out the strategy they used to win on Prop 8, including strategies the Minnesota Family Council has recently utilized to pass a similar amendment in Minnesota.

“We built a campaign volunteer structure around both time-honored campaign grassroots tactics of organizing in churches, with a ground-up structure of church captains, precinct captains, zip code supervisors and area directors; and the latest Internet and web-based grassroots tools,” the duo wrote.

As the Minnesota Independent reported last week, the Minnesota Family Council is organizing pastors, in particular, “church captains.”

Schubert and Flint also said they came up with messages that would “result in voters casting a Yes vote for traditional marriage.” That strategy is to assign “consequences” to the legalization of same-sex marriage.

We strongly believed that a campaign in favor of traditional marriage would not be enough to prevail. We needed to convince voters that gay marriage was not simply ‘live and let live’—that there would be consequences if gay marriage were to be permanently legalized. But how to raise consequences when gay marriage was so recently legalized and not yet taken hold? We made one of the key strategic decisions in the campaign, to apply the principles of running a “No” campaign—raising doubts and pointing to potential problems—in seeking a “Yes” vote. As far as we know, this strategic approach has never before been used by a Yes campaign. We reconfirmed in our early focus groups our own views that Californians had a tolerant opinion of gays. But there were limits to the degree of tolerance that Californians would afford the gay community. They would entertain allowing gay marriage, but not if doing so had significant implications for the rest of society.

We probed long and hard in countless focus groups and surveys to explore reactions to a variety of consequences our issue experts identified. The California Supreme Court ruling put gay couples in a protected legal class on the basis of sexual orientation, and then found that gay couples had a fundamental constitutional right to marriage. This decision significantly changed the legal landscape. No longer would it be enough for Californians to tolerate gay relationships, they would have to accept gay marriage as being equivalent to traditional marriage. Tolerance is one thing; forced acceptance of something you personally oppose is a very different matter.

Whenever a conflict occurred between the rights of a gay couple and other rights, the rights of the gay couple would prevail because of their “protected class” legal status. We settled on three broad areas where this conflict of rights was most likely to occur: in the area of religious freedom, in the area of individual freedom of expression, and in how this new “fundamental right” would be inculcated in young children through the public schools. And we made sure that we had very concrete examples we could share with voters of things that had actually occurred.

The firm noted that widespread dissemination of campaign literature helped persuade voters who might be uncomfortable voting against their neighbors rights.

“This intense commitment to distributing materials throughout the state was the result of another key strategic decision. Supporting traditional marriage is not considered to be ‘politically correct.’” Schubert and Flint said. “We wanted voters who supported our position to know that they were not alone and so we made sure they saw our signs in their neighborhoods and our campaign materials at their church. And if they were part of an ethnic minority, all these were in their native language.”

The campaign then pivoted to television ads that made the threat that homosexuality would be taught in the schools if Prop 8 did not pass. Here’s two examples of the ads used by Schubert Flint in California:

A pair of campaign finance complaints against the National Organization for Marriage and the Minnesota Family Council were dismissed by the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board on Wednesday. Common Cause Minnesota had filed the complaints alleging that advertising by the two groups on an anti-gay marriage amendment in 2010 constituted lobbying. The board ruled that the ads were too vague to trigger the registration requirement for lobbyists.

The board dismissed the complaint against the Minnesota Family Council because the group did not pay for the ads. Though the ads were listed as “Paid for by the Minnesota Family Council and the National Organization for Marriage,” the Family Council did not actually contribute any funds to the ad campaign.

MFC’s CEO John Helmberger told the board,

Because of their shared goals of preserving traditional marriage in Minnesota, National Organization for Marriage asked MFC to help plan the production and placement of the [subject] ads. While MFC had input as to the production and placement of these ads, MFC did not pay for any part of their production or broadcast, nor is it obligated to reimburse the National Organization for Marriage for any part of the cost of producing or broadcasting the ads. Further, during 2010 MFC did not make any contribution to the National Organization for Marriage.

Based on that, the board dismissed the complaint from the group.

“There is no probable cause to believe that MFC paid for or is obligated to pay for any cost of creation, production, distribution, or broadcasting of the subject communications,” the board wrote.

The board also dismissed the complaint against NOM: “There is no probable cause to believe that NOM engaged in activities during 2010 that would require it to report as a principal [lobbyist].”

Because the ads were vague, NOM did not actually lobby for the anti–gay marriage amendment, the board noted. At issue is the fact that although NOM advocated the election of Tom Emmer who supported the amendment, the governor has no say in constitutional amendments.

“The legislation most clearly implied in the ads is the constitutional amendment to define marriage,” the board wrote. “While the next Governor may advocate for a legislative action, the Governor himself or herself can neither force nor prevent the placing a constitutional amendment question before the voters.”

The board also concluded that since no bills on same-sex marriage were active in the Minnesota Legislature at the time the ads came out, the ads did no constitute lobbying.

“Some of the ads also refer generally to the claim that Dayton, Horner, or the DFL legislature want to impose gay marriage on Minnesotans. Considering the fact that at the time the ads ran, there were no active bills and the composition of the next legislature could not be predicted, these references are too remote and vague to constitute an attempt to influence legislative action.”

The board added, “Any influence the ads may have on a the actions of future legislature, the composition of which will not be known until after the 2010 elections, is too speculative to permit regulation of the ads under Minnesota’s principal disclosure statutes.”

Copies of the decisions can be viewed on the board’s website.

Tim Pawlenty is taking heat from the National Organization for Marriage for not signing the group’s pledge to oppose efforts to legalize same-sex marriage. On Thursday, the group announced that Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum had all signed the pledge. But while Pawlenty has hesitated to take the pledge, he gave the Miami Herald a piece of his mind on gay marriage on Thursday.

“What happened with Governor Pawlenty?” asked NOM head Brian Brown in an email to supporters on Thursday. “I have to be honest with you: I do not know.”

Brown’s sidekick, Maggie Gallagher, said she’d talked to Pawlenty’s campaign.

“Pawlenty’s communications director, Ann Marie Hauser, personally informed me on Tuesday that Tim Pawlenty would not sign NOM’s marriage pledge,” she said. “Like many people, we are scratching our heads wondering why Gov. Pawlenty, who has been a champion for marriage in Minnesota, would not commit to doing so for America.”

She added, “At this point, the people of Iowa need to know that Michelle Bachmann and Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are the only candidates willing to step forward and pledge to protect marriage in this campaign. We hope Gov. Pawlenty will reconsider.”

Brown urged NOM’s members to call Pawlenty’s campaign.

“I know you will be polite and civil. But he needs to hear from you that marriage is not just one of many issues; it’s a key issue as you consider voting for the presidency in the first of the nation’s caucuses, in Iowa.”

He added, “This is mission critical!”

The NOM pledge asks candidates to work for a federal constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage, defend the Defense of Marriage Act in court, appoint judges and an attorney general “who will respect the original meaning of the Constitution,” create a commission to investigate harassment of “traditional marriage supporters,” and end same-sex marriage in the District of Columbia.

Pawlenty addressed some of those issues in an interview with the Miami Herald on Thursday, where reporter Marc Caputo pressed Pawlenty on the perceived contradiction of state’s rights versus a federal ban on same-sex marriage:

Q: How about gay marriage?

Pawlenty: “When I was in the Minnesota Legislature, I was a co-author of the Defense of Marriage Act defining marriage as between a man and a woman. I support a state and federal amendment to the constitutions defining amendments as such.”

Q: How do you support being a small-government conservative, yet favor this government limitation on private individuals?

Pawlenty: “The Constitution and our statutes and laws more broadly grant or prohibit all kinds of behaviors or rights. So I don’t think it’s out of bounds in that regard… We have courts who have demonstrated they think they know better than the people on our statutes. And they feel that they should insert their personal or political views into these matters. And the only way to limit court excesses in that regard is to put it in our statutes and our Constitution.”

As heated discussions continue over the national debt, two of Minnesota’s major political parties are wresting with significant debts of their own. According to Federal Election Commission reports filed at the end of July, both the GOP and DFL continue to carry debt from the 2010 election cycle. The Republican Party of Minnesota owes the most — more than $600,000 while the DFL owes close to $300,000. The GOP also had a negative cash-on-hand balance.

The DFL ended June with $291,950.71 in debt while the GOP ended in the red to the tune of $608,147.51. At the end of 2010, the GOP had $681,066 in debt and the DFL had a deficit of $217,004.

The GOP spent more and took in more than the DFL over the last six months, with $1,155,662.18 in receipts and $1,132,739.48 in spending. The DFL spent $660,252.56 and took in $652,944.91 in the first half of the year.

The FEC reports only count debt for the federal activities of the parties. In March, the Star Tribune reported that the DFL was nearly $700,000 in debt and the GOP had nearly $780,000 in obligations from 2010 it still has to pay off.

GOP chair Tony Sutton, who recently announced he would start drawing a six-figure salary from the party, told the Star Tribune in March that “he expects to pay down about $500,000 of their debt by the end of May.”

The campaign of Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison is using Fox News’ criticism of a recent comment he made about Rep. Michele Bachmann to appeal for donations for the upcoming 2012 election.

Ellison told student activists last week that conservatives, including Michele Bachmann, want to keep women barefoot and pregnant. Fox News picked up the clip. By Wednesday, Ellison’s campaign had posted an appeal for funds on his campaign site, saying the “right-wing noise machine” was targeting Ellison.

One of the Fox News appearances of the clip occurred Tuesday on “The Five,” a panel show that replaced Glenn Beck’s show this week.

Greg Gutfeld, host of a 3 a.m. show on Fox, referred to Ellison’s religion.

“It’s kind of rich coming from Ellison, who is a Muslim,” Gutfeld said. “There are plenty of Muslim countries out there that if Michele Bachmann was doing what she was doing would be killed.”

(Gutfeld also questioned why Ellison used such “florid” language to say that the goal of conservatives is to shrink government down to the size where they can “drown it in the bathtub,” which is actually a quote by Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist).

Eric Bolling, a Fox Business host, said he felt “bad for [Bachmann] having to share Minnesota with this [Ellison].”

The financial appeal from the Ellison campaign was up soon after the clips aired on FOX.

“In response to Keith’s strong support of women’s rights, the right-wing media has unleashed another vitriolic attack,” the statement declared. “As a supporter and friend to Keith, you know that his record of fighting for equal rights for women speaks for itself. But will you speak for him?”

The post on Ellison’s site boasted three separate linked appeals for donations.

Ellison’s 2010 opponent, Republican Joel Demos, raised a little more than $95,000 in that election cycle, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, while Ellison raised almost $1.4 million. Ellison won the four-way 2010 race with 67 percent of the vote.

Watch the video:

Several groups working to defeat a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage are gearing up their efforts. Gov. Mark Dayton will speak at the first fundraising event for Minnesotans United for All Families, a coalition of groups that oppose amending the Minnesota Constitution to ban gay marriage. An official kickoff is planned next week. Conservative groups have also planned events opposing the amendment, one of which will coincide with this weekend’s RightOnline conference.

Dayton is the featured guest at an event Monday night at Thom Pham’s Wondrous Azian Kitchen in downtown Minneapolis. The event comes one week before the official kickoff of Minnesotans United for All Families next Monday at the Loring Theatre. At that event, Sen. Scott Dibble, DFL-Minneapolis, will speak and artists including Stacia Rice, Bradley Greenwald, Belladiva, George Maurer, Anne Michaels and the Flying Foot Forum will perform.

A new group, Republicans Against the Minnesota Marriage Amendment (RAMMA), is hosting an event on Friday with conservative columnist SE Cupp and Rep. John Krisel, R-Cottage Grove. The pair will speak on “why they believe Republican and conservative values are consistent with GLBT liberty.” It coincides with the RightOnline conference, a confab for rightwing bloggers.

RAMMA’s mission statement states:

We are Republicans. We believe in individual liberty, limited government, free-market economics, fiscal responsibility, a strong national defense, and enduring moral values taught in families and churches. We differ among ourselves on whether the state of Minnesota should recognize same-sex marriages at this time. But whatever our individual views on same-sex marriage, we oppose the state constitutional amendment limiting marriage to the union of one man and one woman.

Twin Cities Pride is asking the LGBT community for feedback over the decision by Target to stay neutral on an anti–gay marriage amendment that will appear on the ballot in 2012. The Minneapolis-based big box retailer has long been a major sponsor of Twin Cities Pride, one of the largest LGBT celebrations in the country, but political giving to candidates who oppose LGBT rights has prompted Twin Cities Pride to defend itself over accepting Target’s sponsorship.

Target CEO Gregg Steinhafel told shareholders last week that the company would not take a stance on the amendment, and that has fueled further controversy over the retailer’s sponsorship of Pride.

Target’s independent campaign expenditures to Minnesota Forward in support of Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer sparked outcry and protest during the 2010 election, but Twin Cities Pride defended its decision two weeks ago when it announced Target as a major sponsor.

“Twin Cities Pride strongly opposed Target’s contribution to Minnesota Forward and deeply regrets that a Pride sponsor chose to align itself with this particular PAC,” the group said in a statement. “However, Pride draws a clear distinction between the views of the candidate in question, and companies that chose to support this PAC. Target is a model employer in the community and a champion of LGBT equality in the workplace.”

The group, which holds its annual festival June 25 and 26, said that Target continues to make donations to LGBT causes that exceed $500,000 each year in Minnesota and cited changes that Target announced in February to its political giving process.

“A continued sponsorship is a step in the right direction for Target and excluding them from this year’s event would unfairly prevent Target from repairing their reputation in the LGBT community,” the group said.

But Steinhafel’s statement on the anti-gay marriage amendment at a shareholders meeting last week reignited the controversy. “Our position at this particular time is that we are going to be neutral on that particular issue,” he said, “as we would be on other social issues that have polarizing points of view.”

To that Twin Cities Pride said, “Our Board of Directors was appalled this week to learn that Target has publicly stated a neutral position on the Constitutional amendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman.”

The group says it will use the opportunity to educate Target about the amendment and solicited comments on its Facebook page to send to Target. Those comments ran the gamut.

“I don’t like how it is seeming that Target is jumping on the ‘band-wagon’ when it benefits them, but then jumping off or feigning neutrality when asked to stand by their actions,” wrote one community member. “You can’t have your cake and eat it too Target. Choosing to throw themselves in the ring politically and by sponsoring Pride, I feel, opens them up for needing to state where they are on this issue.”

Another commenter had even stronger words. “Pride is a sacred space because it is often the only time LGBT people get to experience full inclusion and welcome in a public space. It is HIGHLY offensive that a company who has funded politicians who are virulently anti-gay would be allowed to have a presence at our event. There will be a very public response.”

Others were eager to give Target a pass based on the chain’s pioneering work on workplace inclusion and hefty giving to LGBT charities.

“Guys, these companies are LEADERS, I’ll say it again, LEADERS in GLBT equality in the workplace. Just because they don’t shout from the heavens like Home Depot has done, doesn’t mean they aren’t equally as important to the GLBT community,” wrote a commenter.

Wrote another, “Yes, it is upsetting that they are ‘neutral,’ but given their strong internal non-discrimination policies I think we can take a “we are disappointed but we’ll wait and see.”

Some called for pulling support from any business that stays neutral on the marriage amendment. “With the anti-gay amendment on the ballot next year, we have to ask ourselves if we really want the support of ‘neutral’ businesses,” one comment read. “We should be embracing the companies that actually appreciate us and want us to have equal rights! Neutral will not give us civil rights.”

And another commenter snarked, “Target is like getting medical care from someone who just shot you on purpose.”