Source: Gage Skidmore, Flickr

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul launched the Minnesota portion of his presidential campaign with a spirited rally at the St. Cloud Civic Center Saturday.

Paul’s speech in St. Cloud touched on issues like domestic economic policy, the drug war and foreign interventions.

“The country and the world is in a mess today, and I’m quite convinced that we know exactly how we get here and exactly what to do,” Paul told the crowd, “and one thing’s for sure is we don’t need more government.”

Paul blamed the Federal Reserve for helping to bring about the speculative bubbles that sunk the nation’s economy.

“It’s the Federal Reserve that by interfering in the monetary system, monkeying around with interest rates, they create the bubbles,” Paul said. “For a while they can create one bubble and patch it up again, but eventually the big bubble bursts.”

He also condemned government bailouts of big banks and companies.

“They said if we don’t bail out the system there would be a depression,” Paul said. “Guess where the depression would have been? It would have been on those who were receiving our money. Instead the depression was dealt to the people, the middle class, they lost their jobs and they lost their houses and we the taxpayer absorbed the debt.”

Paul also voiced support for abolishing the Department of Education and the federal income tax, condemned the drug war as a tragedy and worried about creation of a worldwide monetary currency.

He told supporters that the country is increasingly in agreement with their libertarian economic views.

“We’re witnessing the end of an economic era,” Paul said. “This is a tremendous opportunity for those of us who believe in liberty to get this message out.”

Paul’s foreign policy stances have drawn jeers from some Republican crowds at debates, but he continues to advocate for neutrality and condemn the United States’ assassination of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, saying that ”what we must worry about is the rule of law because the rule of law protects us.”

Organizers put the turnout for the Republican candidate at about 2,500. Paul has trailed in most polls, but has captured a number of high-profile straw poll victories.

“You can not stop an idea whose time has come and the idea of liberty’s time has returned,” Paul said of his supporters. “We don’t have to understand each little issue, all we have to do is legalize freedom.”

Voters who have trouble filling in an oval on a ballot get no sympathy from state Sen. Dick Day and state Rep. Mary Kiffmeyer, leaving Kiffmeyer’s successor as Secretary of State, Mark Ritchie, to preach love, constitutional protection and enfranchisement for tremorous or otherwise-impaired citizens. For all three the issue is personal:

Day: “I personally don’t care if they’re disenfranchised or not and most of the people that I talk to don’t really care.”

Kiffmeyer: “My personal feeling sometimes is that I don’t know that I owe it to you to figure out your confusing ballot.”

Ritchie: “My grandmother, sharp as a tack until the day she died, shook. She could not fill in a circle. … I’ve heard from many people who’ve been disparaging — if you cannot fill in a circle, that breaks my heart when I think about my grandmother.”

Full quotes and video of Day and Ritchie after the jump.

In addition to offering prescient comments about ferreting out wrongly-accepted absentee ballots in the Senate recount, Kiffmeyer spoke to the St. Paul Legal Ledger on the topic of sloppy voters:

Kiffmeyer has little sympathy for voters whose cast ballots were not clearly marked. “My personal feeling sometimes is that I don’t know that I owe it to you to figure out your confusing ballot,” she said. “Maybe you’re just confused. And how am I going to figure out your confusion?”

Minnesota law, however, requires that election officials in a recount situation delve into the “intent of the voter” – as Kiffmeyer acknowledges – if intent can be clearly determined. “But if it is so confusing that you’re really taking kind of a blind guess, then OK, it’s undecided,” Kiffmeyer said. “It’s no vote for anybody.”

Day and Ritchie were captured on video by The Uptake during a state Senate committee hearing Friday. Here’s the clip, followed by transcriptions of their comments courtesy of MN Progressive Project:

Day:

“If the stupidity is such, that there’s Ys and arrows and Xs, and whatever, why isn’t it that we can put it in a machine, and if the machine can’t read what somebody is trying to vote for, I personally don’t care if they’re disenfranchised or not and most of the people that I talk to don’t really care because if you’re educated and you can’t fill an oval in, … would it better if the machine can’t read it, that’s it. We just don’t sit around and spend, and go through five or ten thousand ballots that somebody might wanted vote for somebody … I don’t know. That seems to me just a huge waste of time, so explain to me why I’m wrong here on that.”

Ritchie:

“Madame Chair, Senator Day, the founders of our nation and the writers of the Minnesota Constitution did not require that the citizens only be able to vote if they can comply with the demands of the machine manufacturers. My grandmother, sharp as a tack until the day she died, shook. She could not fill in a circle. So, if the proposal is that if you can’t comply with the conditions of the manufacturer of machines, wonderful machines that give us great accuracy and great, very timely results in most respects, then you don’t get to vote, then that’s a dramatic change from the founders of the nation and the writers of the Minnesota Constitution. It is a proposal that I’ve heard from many people who’ve been disparaging — if you cannot fill in a circle, that breaks my heart when I think about my grandmother, and that somebody’s saying she should not be allowed to vote because the machine manufactured by a company in Taiwan cannot read her vote.”