Elections

An anonymous flier in Maplewood last week targeting openly gay city council candidate Jim Llanas has raised a ruckus in advance of Tuesday’s city election. But the situation in Maplewood is not unique: LGBT candidates across the country are facing anonymous attacks. The sad part is, they often work.

With just under a week until the Maplewood city elections, the quirky politics of the suburb just north of St. Paul have taken some interesting turns. Dueling fliers that some residents have found “racist and homophobic” and a 911 recording of a candidate allegedly threatening a neighbor are among the more noteworthy occurrences.

When Maplewood city council candidate Jim Llanas told the Minnesota Independent this summer, “Brace yourself. It’s just going to get ugly,” he wasn’t far off the mark. An anonymous flier being distributed about Llanas, who would be both the first openly gay and the first Hispanic city council member in the city’s history, is being described as racist and homophobic by a progressive group and a city council member.

A lawsuit filed against Secretary of State Mark Ritchie by the conservative Minnesota Majority and a handful of Republican lawmakers and activists was dismissed by the Minnesota Supreme Court on Thursday. The suit alleged that Ritchie did not keep voter rolls updated during the 2008 elections.

When state legislators want to make major changes to law, sometimes they put the law to the voters to decide. This year, they’re asking Minnesotans where we stand on issues like guns, health care and labor unions. There’s even a bill to ask the voters whether the state Constitution should be amended to change the way Minnesota amends the Constitution.

The religious right had a bad day on Tuesday. The election of Barack Obama and Democratic gains in the U.S. Senate and House put support for religious right policies further out of reach, and there’s plenty of blame to go around. Some say Republican John McCain coddled Obama on the issues, and others point to President Bush’s noncommittal attitude for issues the religious right cares about the most: gay marriage and abortion. The one bit of post-election hope seems to be the ascension of Sarah Palin as a religious right figurehead.

CNN goes Star Wars on Election Night with a “hologram” reporter calling in from Chicago, and apparently the future. Thanks to Talking Points Memo for posting the video with Jedi-like speed. It caused Tweeters from all over to twitter and giggle.

The Obama campaign is telling its vast network of supporters that the race in Minnesota is tighter than they expected. Is it a ploy for a last minute get-out-the-vote push? Or is it real concern?

Minnesota Majority, a conservative group that was until recently headed by Republican activist and former Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer, is under fire by current Secretary of State Mark Ritchie for alleged voter intimidation. Ritchie announced today that he has asked prosecutors to look into a phone call placed to a St. Paul man on behalf of the group.

Less than two months before the general election, the Government Accountability Office has released a report on the failures of the “accredited laboratories” that test voting systems. After the debacles that were the 2000 and 2004 elections, when voting systems failed and votes weren’t counted, Congress created the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which called [...]