You’d think a Minnesota Democrat who voted for someone other than Al Franken for U.S. Senate might have second thoughts after five months of electoral agony — especially if that voter saw the effects of Franken’s near-tie with Republican Norm Coleman up close.

“I have no misgivings whatsoever,” says Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann, who helped lead the recount work and testified for days at the election contest trial.

Gelbmann is in the spotlight again today, counting ballots as the trial reaches a finale with the three-judge panel examining as many as 400 votes that Coleman hopes, likely in vain, will erase Franken’s 225-vote recount lead.

Gelbmann, who managed Mark Dayton’s successful 2000 campaign for U.S. Senate and then headed the Democrat’s Minnesota office for six years, did not cast his ballot for Al Franken last November. Instead, he voted for Independence Party candidate Dean Barkley.

“I was very annoyed and disgusted at how both candidates [Franken and Coleman] handled the campaign, with very little focus on the issues and very much on personal attacks,” Gelbmann says.

“It was a protest vote,” he acknowledges. “But it wasn’t just a protest vote.”

Gelbmann almost achieved poster-child status for Democrats who didn’t vote for Franken when he was on the witness stand in the election contest trial in January. But an objection from Coleman’s lawyers kept him from testifying to that fact.

Barkley would make a good senator, Gelbmann says. That’s one thing Barkley and Coleman have that Franken doesn’t: experience serving in the U.S. Senate. Gov. Jesse Ventura appointed Barkley to fill out the remainder of Paul Wellstone’s term after the Democrat’s untimely death in 2002.

But Gelbmann has a personal connection that distinguishes him from the average Democratic voter. He and Barkley know each other from the late 1990s, when both worked on the third floor of the state government’s Centennial Office Building — Gelbmann as director of the Minnesota Board of Government Innovation and Cooperation, and Barkley heading up the state Office of Strategic and Long-range Planning for Ventura.

Still, Gelbmann’s ticket-splitting raises the question of what role DFL voters played in setting the stage for Minnesota’s recount drama. Franken drew plenty of criticism for shortcomings as a candidate, and political observers say Democrats who didn’t vote for him don’t have to take the blame for Franken’s post-election ordeal.

Longtime DFL activist Arvonne Fraser notes that “party loyalty isn’t what it used to be.” In her view, Franken is a “very smart guy and a very hard worker” but endorsement and primary battles “didn’t help him at all [with DFL voters].”

Eric Ostermeier, a political scientist who writes the University of Minnesota’s Smart Politics blog, found Franken’s showing to be fourth-worst in DFL Party history. In an e-mail to MnIndy, he cast GOP voters as the main actors in November’s electoral drama:

The party-loyalty angle I guess would be this: the question is probably not so much why did DFLers split their ticket (as Franken carried most of them), but rather why were Republicans less likely to defect and vote for Franken, when they were willing to defect and vote for Obama and DFL US and State House candidates.

University of Minnesota history professor Hy Berman agrees. “I would guess that very few Republicans voted for Franken.” But Berman adds: “The fact is that core DFLers did vote for Franken.”

He ascribes the 10-percentage point gap between Franken’s result in Minnesota and Barack Obama’s to two factors: Franken’s negatives as a candidate and “the existence of a Barkley.”

“Franken being a flawed candidate had nothing to do with the campaign he ran but who he is,” Berman says.

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.

Otherwise it was once again the Jim Gelbmann show throughout the morning at the  contest between Coleman and Al Franken. The Deputy Secretary of State spent his second third day on the stand discussing the vagaries of election law and various categories of contested ballots. He refused to concede that some ballots were counted twice during the recount (as argued by the Coleman camp), and painstakingly explained state rules for protecting the integrity of ballots.

The 133 ballots that went missing from a Minneapolis precinct prompted this exchange between Coleman attorney Joe Fiedberg and Gelbmann:

Friedberg: “The chain of custody is kind of academic in that case, isn’t it? There is none.”

Gelbmann: “For the 133 ballots that is a correct statement.”

Gelbmann is finally done on the stand. The court will reconvene at 1:30, presumably with a new witness.

Franken’s team was trying to show that Gelbmann — who ran a statewide U.S. Senate campaign for Democrat Mark Dayton and then ran his local office after his election —  could conduct his duties without partisanship.

Acknowledging his feelings towards Franken and Coleman in open court seems like it would have helped make that argument. Gelbmann told the South Washington County Bullentin in a Jan. 22 article:

I was disgusted with the campaigns by both candidates. I couldn’t stomach the negative ads, which were way out for Minnesota standards.

Smaller newspapers are turning up intriguing bits to some of the second-tier stars of the Minnesota Senate election drama. Yesterday another suburban newspaper carried a profile of Coleman attorney Fritz Knaak in which he made (passing) reference to a (conjectural) Coleman concession and offered other insights into the Republican’s legal squadron.

Friedberg chivalrously escorted Gelbmann through a seemingly interminable series of absentee ballots that were rejected for various reasons in the Nov. 4 election pitting the incumbent Republican Sen. Coleman against Democratic challenger Al Franken. Gelbmann, whom the secretary of state’s office offered up as a witness at the Coleman camp’s request, nimbly recollected individual ballots from around the state like old pals. (Both sides cited his motto, “Every ballot has a story,” to buttress their arguments before reporters after court recessed Tuesday.)

The questioning appeared to take a dramatic turn when Friedberg said, “Let’s go there,” apparently intending to launch a discussion of the controversial Minnesota Supreme Court order that allowed both campaigns to prevent counting of individual ballots that local officials had determined, on review, they had wrongly rejected. But an objection from the Franken side sent Friedberg back to his stack of ballots, though not before getting Gelbmann to agree that the Supreme Court’s order disenfranchised voters.

The dry but congenial back-and-forth got a bit personal when Gelbmann testified that his mother’s Parkinson’s disease made it hard for her to sign her name. That echoed a much more emotional statement by Gelbmann’s boss, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, who told a Minnesota Senate committee earlier this month that his own grandmother’s tremors prevented her from filling in ovals on ballots.

Gelbmann seemed to be getting more testy — or perhaps simply more tired — as the morning dragged on, addressing Friedberg as “sir” with an edge to his voice that had thus far been mostly absent. Friedberg’s questioning by the end became more pointed as he angled for evidence that Minnesota didn’t offer voters across the state equal protection as they sought to exercise their franchise to vote.

At 11:25 a.m., Franken attorney David Lillehaug began his cross-examination of Gelbmann.

Norm Coleman’s legal team called a half-dozen voters to the witness stand on the second day of the Minnesota trial that may decide who gains the seat Coleman formerly held in the U.S. Senate.

The voters’ testimony occupied the first part of the afternoon in court Tuesday after a morning in which the action was entirely behind the scenes, as three election contest trial judges met in chambers with attorneys from the Coleman and Al Franken campaigns. And their personal tales of electoral woe went a ways toward refreshing the palate after a disastrous Monday in which the judges rejected Coleman’s photocopied evidence.

Three elderly men, two younger men and one woman told three judges that their votes in the Nov. 4, 2008, election didn’t count because local officials determined that absentee ballot and registration signatures didn’t match. All said the Republican Party had contacted them with news that their votes hadn’t been counted, though not all had confirmed that information with officials.

Eugene Markman of Waite Park, Minn., said he voted by absentee ballot so that he could spend 16 hours as chief election judge at a precinct in his former home town of St. Cloud. Coleman attorney Jim Langdon asked Markman to read aloud the reason (signature mismatch) another local official noted for rejecting his ballot.

“Whoever wrote this don’t know how to write either,” Markman said with disgust.

Douglas Thompson told the judges his signatures didn’t match because his girlfriend was responsible for one of them.

Coleman attorney Ben Ginsburg, a veteran of Bush v. Gore presidential recount case in 2000, told reporters at the end of the day that putting voters on the stand was the court’s idea. “The judges suggested to counsel that it would be very helpful to hear from some real people in real situations,” he said.

Ginsburg also cited the day’s last witness called by Coleman’s side, Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann, who had testified that “matching of signatures is the one area where there is a level of discretion allowed by the local officials.” Such variation by locality, Ginsburg insisted, “is a perfect illustration of what we need to correct in this process.” To sum up the problem, Ginsburg again pointed to another statement by Gelbmann: “Every ballot has its own story.”

But that same phrase was also a keynote in Franken attorney Marc Elias’ arguments presented to the press after court adjourned for the day. In Elias’ telling, Gelbmann’s saying means that decisions made by local officials in the original canvass and again in the statewide recount should stand: They have already elicited each ballot’s story.

Elias expressed one frustration with a metaphor (trying “to chase this rabbit around a hole”) that another Franken attorney, Kevin Hamilton, had called “a constant game of shuffling the deck” in a strenuous objection before the court. The problem they allege: Coleman’s team continuously changes the so-called “universe” of rejected ballots they want the three judges to review. The day’s presiding judge on the panel, Denise Reilly of Hennepin County District Court, said the court would take the objection under advisement.

But such procedural moves weren’t what Coleman, who (unlike Franken) was again present for the trial today, wanted to talk to reporters about afterward. “Today we saw the human side of this,” he said. “It’s heartwarming to be here and to hear Minnesotans come forward and be so passionate about having their votes counted.”

That passion was on display with Coleman’s first witness, Gerald W. Anderson of St. Paul, who said he is blind and cast his first vote for Eisenhower in 1952. As for the vote Republicans told him was rejected, he protested loudly: “I want it back! I’m entitled to my vote!”

Mary Kiffmeyer in her salad days, as Minnesota secretary of state.

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.

Last Friday Secretary of State Mark Ritchie held a press conference to address those issues and to debunk the implication that Minnesota’s electoral system — which has been acknowledged by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission as one of the best in the country — is rife with fraud and inaccuracy. The SoS office’s response elicited a second letter from Minnesota Majority that said, in effect, “not good enough.” (All the correspondence in the matter is reproduced in PDF format at the end of this story.)

Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann, who responded to the letter in writing on behalf of the SoS’s office, tells MnIndy that such are a tactic to scare away voters. It’s a system created by Republican operatives that’s been in place for decades: Challenge voters in mostly minority areas or, as is the case with Minnesota Majority, launch a media campaign in an effort to allege voter fraud and limit political participation in strictly Democratic-leaning precincts. And Gelbmann notes that similar campaigns are springing up statewide as a partisan machination to suppress votes.

“It’s pretty clear that it’s a strategy by a number of groups to cast doubt about the integrity of our system,” Gelbmann says. “Yet Minnesota has one of the best systems for verification in the country. This is a very deliberate effort to start raising questions. Their aim is to keep people from voting.”

Yet even if Minnesota Majority’s claims appear specious at best, they are a likely harbinger of the kind of voter challenges that will come from organizations like Kiffmeyer’s on Election Day.

“Vacant addresses”: different from “vacant homes”

Kiffmeyer–the woman Hennepin County commissioner Mike Opat once called “probably the least competent person to hold this important office in Minnesota history—was voted out of SoS in 2006. She then joined Minnesota Majority as its executive director.

The religious-right organization is mostly dedicated to culture-war tubthumping; the “Issues” tab on its website includes “Illegal Aliens,” “Homosexual ‘Marriage’,” “Comprehensive Sex Education, “Embryonic Stem Cell Research” and “Climate Change.” The group is probably best known for a claim, published last year on its website, that Swedes had a lower infant mortality rate because they were “racially pure.” Kiffmeyer is now running for a state legislative seat in District 16B.

In the letter to Ritchie’s office, Minnesota Majority President Jeff Davis says the results of the organization’s analysis “suggest that there may be broad-based integrity problems in the Minnesota voter registration file.” Among the principal claims, Davis states that in 2004 and 2006 there were 10,099 voters in Anoka and Hennepin Counties who now reside at “vacant addresses.”

“Vacant addresses” is a nebulous term. After the 2004 election, Minnesota outlawed the practice of building voter caging lists compiled from returned mail sent by a political party. But the law does not preclude organizations like Minnesota Majority from using a special portion of the Postal Service’s database to challenge the validity of voter information, or from showing up at the polls to intimidate voters in urban communities.

Minnesota Majority says that in order to find voters living at “vacant addresses,” it used the United States Postal Service Delivery Sequence File (DSF2) to determine address verification. According to Anchor Computer, a company that sells DSF2 database system, the software is designed to reduce the mailing costs associated with undeliverable mail.

According to the company, addresses must exactly match those in the system to be verified, or they will be marked as “undeliverable” or “vacant address” by the DSF2 database. That means a single mailer, like a catalog, for example, with missing information such as an apartment number could be returned as “vacant address.” Furthermore, in a case study for a catalog mailer conducted by Anchor Computer, nearly 1 percent of the addresses on the catalogs received a “vacant address” error.

Gelbmann counters that if the 10,099 people in question voted in 2004 and 2006, then their registrations were verified by the SoS office. Whenever anyone registers, Gelbmann says, the county auditor’s office sends out a non-forwardable postcard to the registrant’s address to ensure they live at the listed address. If the postcard is returned to the county attorney’s office, the voter is challenged at the poll and required to show ID and address verification.

“One of the frustrations with Minnesota Majority’s claims is that they are reiterating the same claims they made last week without providing documentation,” says Gelbmann. ”We addressed their concerns last week and explained how the system works. We do not make public the names that will be challenged at the polls, but there are tens of thousands of people who are on are list who will be challenged and asked to provide verification. We have a long history of having one of the best systems for verification in the country,” he says. “People should not be concerned about voter fraud in Minnesota.”

A history of disenfranchising voters?

In 2004, right before the election, then-Secretary of State Kiffmeyer came under national scrutiny. In September of 2004, Kiffmeyer issued a press release outlining Minnesota’s plans — in conjunction with the Bush administration’s Department of Homeland Security — to combat “homicide bombers.” Included were what Kiffmeyer’s office said were telltale signs of a potential disruption or homicide bomber: cars “riding low with springs,” persons exuding “unexplained or unusual odors.” (“Smells may range from fruity/flowery,” the missive noted, “to sharp/pungent, garlic/horseradish-like, bitter almonds, peach kernels and new mown grass/hay.”)

As the Washington Post noted at the time, several election officials were outraged by the fliers the SoS’s office created, refusing to distribute them on the grounds that they discouraged voting and singled out voters of religious, racial, or ethnic groups for harassment.

That same year, Kiffmeyer also attempted to enact a law that would have forbidden Indians living outside a reservation to use their tribal cards to register to vote on Election Day. After a civil rights lawsuit was filed, Kiffmeyer eventually agreed to allow the tribal cards to be used.

Despite Kiffmeyer’s past or her organization’s current attempts at disenfranchising voters via, so far, mostly media blasts, Gelbmann says there’s a safety net in place to ensure all voters are legitimate, though he acknowledges nothing is foolproof.

“No system that’s trying to get 3.2 million people out to vote is error-free,” he says. The SOS’s office has a new campaign this year, 80 percent in ’08. It’s hoping to have record voter turnout, despite attempts to halt the process. “There’s a lot of scare tactics out there, like people saying if your house is being foreclosed on you can’t vote,” Gelbmann says. “But that is entirely not true. And we hope everyone comes out and votes this year and sees this. [Minnesota Majority's] aim is to keep people from voting. That’s why we held a press conference and brought our frontline employees to ensure everyone that this system is as good as any human system can be.”

The ACORN factor

While Gelbmann says people should not be concerned about voter fraud in Minnesota, there’s no doubt people on all sides of the political spectrum are indeed concerned. MnIndy’s sister site, Michigan Messenger, reported in September that a GOP official in that state affirmed a plan to challenge voters living at addresses for which there were foreclosure filings. The GOP official subsequently denied making the statement.

And there is further reason for real consternation. In 2004 in Ohio, a state that’s once again up for grabs and shows all signs of becoming contentious, the GOP sent out “do not forward” mailers. The returned mail resulted in more than 35,000 voters being challenged.

Gelbmann acknowledges that the scandal surrounding voter registration efforts by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) has given more visibility to partisan scare rhetoric about vote fraud. John McCain recently called the nonprofit organization, whose voter-registration program turned up fake voters, a “threat to the fabric of our democracy.” The organization has admitted that some voter-registration forms it collected throughout the country are invalid.

Gelbmann says that here in Minnesota, in 2006, ACORN was also paying its employees for each new voter-registration form they collected. The result was that false voter-registration cards were created for people who don’t exist. Yet Gelbmann says that those voters have either been removed or added to the “challenge” list after cards sent by the respective county auditor’s offices were returned.

“ACORN was paying people for every voter they registered,” Gelbmann says. “Unfortunately, they had some people who were employed who weren’t very honest and created fake voter-registration cards out of an incentive to get paid. But that person isn’t going to try to vote. They don’t exist. The only reason they got on that list as a fake name is because someone wanted to make money.”

ACORN acknowledges some of its employees created false voter-registration cards. In a letter published this week by the San Francisco Chronicle, the chair of California ACORN, says, “the small percentage of problematic cards that we have submitted to local election boards in 2008 — and that we are required by law to submit, even cards that we can plainly see are invalid — will not result in any illegal voting, contrary to over-the-top partisan claims. The irony in these attacks is that our registration drive and get-out-the-vote program is nonpartisan.”

Yet ACORN wasn’t the only organization paying employees per new voter registration. Employees of an organization called Young Political Majors (YPM) were paid $7 to $12 per registered Republican voter, many of whom signed up, according to a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, because they believed they were signing petitions for stricter penalties against child molesters.

As a result of these practices, in 2008 Minnesota made it illegal to pay for voter registrations. And Gelbmann reiterates that regardless of partisan politics and voter schemes, “phantom voters” will not be showing up to the polls and posing a threat to Minnesota’s voting system — because they simply don’t exist.

More:

Minnesota Majority’s letter to the Secretary of State’s office (PDF)

SoS office’s reply (PDF)

Minnesota Majority’s second letter (PDF)