Deputy Sec. of State on not voting for Franken: ‘No misgivings whatsoever’

Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann says he has no regrets about voting for Independence Party candidate Dean Barkley over Al Franken. But his ticket-splitting raises the question of what role DFL voters played in setting the stage for Minnesota’s recount drama. Political observers say Democrats who didn’t vote for Franken don’t have to take the blame. As one observer put it, “party loyalty isn’t what it used to be.”

Coleman drops challenge to Maplewood ballots

The 171 Maplewood ballots are off the table in the U.S. Senate contest. These ballots were discovered by local election officials in a voting machine during the manual recount and added to the vote tally. Norm Coleman’s legal team initially argued that they should not have been included in the recount, but this morning they withdrew their objection to the contested ballots.

Coleman’s trial witness, a Dem, voted for Barkley — but court won’t hear it

He didn’t get the chance to say it on the stand, under cross-examination in the Senate election-contest trial. But Minnesota Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann, a Democrat, voted Nov. 4 for neither Al Franken nor Norm Coleman, opting…

Gelbmann’s grilling by hotshot Friedberg ends after four hours in Senate trial

After taking a folksy turn Tuesday with testimony from frustrated voters, Norm Coleman’s legal team began to deliver on the tedium it promised in the trial sparked by Coleman’s election-contest lawsuit. The folksy quotient remained high, however,…

Coleman puts six voters on stand in Senate election contest trial

Norm Coleman’s legal team called a half-dozen voters to the witness stand on the second day of Minnesota’s U.S. Senate election contest trial. Their personal tales of electoral woe went a ways toward refreshing the court’s palate after a disastrous Monday in which the judges chucked Coleman’s altered evidence, but not without lingering overtones of forgery.

Election official: Group tied to ex-MN Secretary of State Kiffmeyer aims to ‘keep people from voting’

Former Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer may not be in the business of supervising elections anymore, but it doesn’t mean she and her friends have abandoned their old habits.

The “traditional values” organization of which Kiffmeyer is the executive director, Minnesota Majority, has been poking around Minnesota’s voter-registration file, and in a pair of letters to Secretary of State Mark Ritchie’s office over the past week, MN Majority president Jeff Davis claims to have unearthed thousands of suspicious registrations in the state’s voter records.