Jim Gelbmann

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.”

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.

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 instead for Independence Party candidate Dean Barkley. Franken’s attorney was leading him with a line of [...]

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, as storied trial attorney Joe Friedberg charmingly dragged his mostly mild but unrelenting grilling of Deputy Secretary of [...]

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.

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.