Somali voter influence claims raise more questions than answers

Last night Omar Jamal, head of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center, told KSTP news that as many as 500 people were either persuaded or misled to vote for Al Franken at the Brian Coyle Center on Tuesday. The report raises serious questions about Jamal’s claims: Only two days ago Jamal told the same news station that complaints were coming from voters who said translators were persuading people to vote for Franken and Norm Coleman. He claimed that Franken and Coleman workers were, according to KSTP, trying to illegally influence a “few dozen” Somali voters. Suddenly that number has leapt to 500, and Jamal now says they were all persuaded to vote for Franken.

What’s more, though a Coleman staffer was on hand all day, Jamal now dismisses complaints that translators were influencing people to vote for Coleman and tells a reporter from M’shale that they “were lying.”

Secretary of State’s office says laws may have been broken in Somali translator voting incident

The Minnesota Secretary of State’s office says that if Coleman staffer Mahoumad Wardere was on site at Brian Coyle Center for most of the afternoon that Minnesota election laws were “potentially” broken. According to Beth Fraser, director of governmental affairs at the Secretary of State’s office, an interpreter can only be inside a polling place if they are assisting a specific voter. They cannot remain onsite, as we reported Wardere did, acting as a go-to interpreter.

WCCO and KSTP pick up MnIndy’s story about voter issues at Brian Coyle Center

(Updated at 8:19 p.m.) Today I was interviewed by WCCO’s Esme Murphy about my story regarding voter allegations of illegal activity and intimidation at Brian Coyle Center yesterday. The main issue, as we reported yesterday, was that a Coleman campaign staffer named Mahamoud Wardere was on hand nearly the entire day, at least from 11:00 a.m. till past 3:00 p.m., acting as an interpreter and/or challenger. And a handful of voters–at least three to me and two to an election observer–complained that interpreters were telling people to vote for Norm Coleman.

At the end of her report, Murphy noted that Norm Coleman’s campaign manager, Cullen Sheehan, said Wardere did nothing wrong. He was only there to act as an interpreter, Sheehan said, and he had a “Republican attorney with him at all times.”

Yet that’s not the entire story.