Former Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer. Photo: Paul Schmelzer, Minnesota Independent

Updated: Shortly after the Star Tribune reported that the faith-based Riverview Community Bank had been shut down by the state, we — like others — noticed that the paper’s online report deleted a reference to Mary Kiffmeyer, the sometimes controversial former Secretary of State and current state representative who has close ties to the bank. And, according to Lexis-Nexis, the Pioneer Press’ online story was also modified since publication Friday to remove mention of the Big Lake Republican. Why?

Strib business reporter Chris Serres says it’s a “relevant question” that has a “mundane answer.”

“We had very tight space in Saturday’s paper and had to cut information on the story that ran online, so I cut out Kiffmeyer,” he told the Minnesota Independent, adding that it was his choice, rather than an editor’s, what got cut. “The online version was updated to match the latest print version of the story.”

But the deleted line appears to have saved only 18 words (here’s a pasted-in version of the piece at a Google Group; the story doesn’t appear in Lexis-Nexis), and the first version of the story, which ran at 419 words, is actually much shorter than the 554-word piece that’s available at StarTribune.com.

To that, Serres said he wanted to focus more on the “God stuff,” instead of Kiffmeyer’s ties to the bank, which he feels fewer people know about. A Federal Reserve Bank agreement, signed by Kiffmeyer on Oct. 9, lists her as president and director of American Eagle Financial Corporation, which owns and controls Riverview Community Bank.

“I thought that stuff was more interesting than Mary Kiffmeyer,” he said.  Then, noting the dozen or so complaints he got, he added, “given the number of phone calls and emails, there’s a pretty good argument it could’ve been in the story. Relevance is often in the eyes of the beholder.”

However, as I prepared this post, I noticed that the Pioneer Press has also removed mention of Kiffmeyer from its story. According to Lexis-Nexis, this innocuous-seeming line was removed from the online story: “Mary Kiffmeyer, former Minnesota secretary of state, was on the bank’s board of directors, according to the Minnesota Bankers Association’s bank directory.” (In one instance, the line does appear in an AP-syndicated version of the story.)

PiPress reporter Nicole Garrison-Sprenger has not yet responded to my email and voicemail queries on the topic. I did call Serres of the Star Tribune back to ask if Kiffmeyer or her representative called him to request modifications to the story.

“No. Absolutely not,” he told me. “I never got a call from anyone at the bank, a board member, anyone, period.”

But he seemed less certain when I again asked him if he — not an editor — removed the mention of Kiffmeyer.  He twice replied, “I think I took it out.” Finally, he replied, “I had to cut stuff out of the story to make it fit. Yeah, it was my call.”

Update: Garrison-Sprenger emails that the Pioneer Press currently has two versions of the story online. The first one, which didn’t include Kiffmeyer’s name, was published before she’d looked into the bank’s ownership and board members; the newer one, which ran in the print edition, includes mention of Kiffmeyer.

A painting at Riverview bank, via Nick Coleman on Twitter

In 2000, evangelist Chuck Ripka says he had a vision from God: He was to start a faith-based bank in Otsego, and with the backing of the Lord his Riverview Community Bank could not fail. In fact, God told Ripka that he would create such an “acceleration” in the bank’s success that Ripka would be called to counsel secular banks on his business plan. On Friday afternoon, the state of Minnesota closed the bank and the federal government took over its assets.

The bank had seen initial success but after getting tied up in bad real estate loans, it turned its last profit in 2007. Ripka left the bank in 2006 and former Secretary of State and current member of the Minnesota House Mary Kiffmeyer was at the helm when the feds took over the bank on Friday. She is president and director of the bank’s holding company, American Eagle Financial Corp.

The bank had $108 million in assets at the end of August and this summer, 90 percent of the bank’s loans were for real estate. Riverview was cited in June for being undercapitalized.

It is the fifth bank to fail in Minnesota this year. The bank’s assets will be taken over by Central Bank of Stillwater. According to the FDIC, the bank will likely cost the Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF) $20 million.

When it was founded, Riverview was looked at by evangelicals as the center of a revival in the Elk River area. In The Elk River Story: Transforming the Spiritual Climate of a City — a 2004 book written by Elk River townspeople, including the mayor, spotlighting the Christian explosion in that city — Ripka penned a chapter about Riverview.

The Lord said, “I’m going to cause such an acceleration of this bank, that you will be invited to speak to secular groups about what has made the bank successful.” The Lord told me, “Chuck, if you will do the things I’ve called you to do, I will take care of the bottom line.” Two weeks before the bank opened up, I prayed about what should go on the cornerstone of the bank. Then the Lord told me to put these words on the cornerstone “In God We Trust.” The week before the bank opened up the Lord told me to pastor the bank. “Take what I have taught you and pass it on to others,” He told me. “Teach others within the bank to pray for the customers. Not only will your customers make physical deposits in your bank, but you will also make spiritual deposits into you customers.”

Ripka did not return a request for comment about the bank.

Photo: Chris Steller, Minnesota Independent

A flurry of campaign filings on deadline day increased Minneapolis’ candidate pool by a third and brought to 22 the number of races that could be decided by the city’s new system of instant-runoff voting (IRV).

Of 98 candidates who filed to run for city offices from mayor to park commissioner, 26 signed up on Tuesday, the final day to file.

Those last-minute candidates included John Malone, the lead individual plaintiff in a lawsuit to stop Minneapolis from using IRV for the first time in November’s municipal elections. The Minnesota Supreme Court decided last month to reject that effort and let the city proceed with the IRV system, also known as ranked-choice voting.

Ironically, Malone’s entry as the third candidate in the race for District 1 park commissioner opens that contest to potentially being decided by the very counting process he opposed in court.

In an election in which three or more candidates vie for a single seat, the leading vote-getter may be favored on fewer than half the ballots. Under the old system, the leader would win with a plurality. This year, under IRV, that situation would trigger a second round of counting in which voters’ second-choice preferences enter the tally.

(Minneapolis voters opted for the new system by referendum, a choice St. Paul voters will make with their own referendum this fall. IRV means Minneapolis won’t hold a primary election as it has in the past.)

Malone says he didn’t become a candidate to start another scrap over IRV. “I’m no fan of ranked voting,” said Malone, who contends the system “disenfranchises voters.” But with the lawsuit now settled, he told the Minnesota Independent, “there’s no use crying over spilled milk.”

A case built on math

But to Andy Cilek, Malone’s former co-worker who recruited him to join the suit, the fight goes on.

“We’re already getting ready [for new legal action],” says Cilek, executive director of Minnesota Voters Alliance (MVA), the organization that took Minneapolis to court over IRV. “We want to drive this to the federal courts.”

It wasn’t part of MVA’s strategy to have an anti-IRV candidate run for office in Minneapolis this year, said Cilek, who expressed surprise at hearing of Malone’s candidacy. “I wish him luck,” he said.

Rather than an aggrieved candidate, all MVA needs for the next court battle is a close race and a few citizens from the right district willing to sign on to a lawsuit.

The organization has math experts on call who can break down IRV election results to demonstrate what he calls “the Michael Behrendt Effect.” In a St. Paul Pioneer Press op-ed today, Cilek rechristens the phenomenon — otherwise known as “nonmonotonicity” — after Behrendt, an Aspen, Colo. city-council candidate.

By Cilek’s account, Behrendt lost in a ranked-choice voting fiasco in which voters actually hurt their preferred candidates by ranking them first. IRV proponents contend the danger is impossibly small or even merely theoretical. (Aspen’s system differs from Minneapolis’ in that voters’ first and second choices carry equal weight in the first round of counting.)

Where IRV could hold sway

Indeed, said Jeanne Massey, executive director of IRV advocacy group FairVote Minnesota, even the scenario of a standard IRV-decided election is unlikely in most of the 22 (out of 25) races for 25 city seats in which it’s possible — races like the one for mayor (incumbent R.T. Rybak and 10 challengers) in which the vote will be divided among enough candidates to trigger, in theory at least, the tabulation of voters’ lower-rank choices.

Factoring in political probabilities reduces the likely number of races that could realistically see more than one round of counting to a mere handful, according to Massey, who made that assessment midway through the filing deadline day. Two open seats, in Wards 1 and 10, seemed to Massey to have the “best chance” among 13 city council races — “but the chance is not very great,” she said.

Massey is more certain that two multi-seat contests in Minneapolis will test the city’s new system of ranked-choice voting: park board commissioner-at-large (eight candidates for three seats) and Board of Estimate and Taxation (six candidates for two seats).

In the tax-board race, incumbent Carol Becker is likely to win re-election outright, in Massey’s view, leaving only one of two seats likely to be decided by counting lower-ranked votes.

The park board at-large race was already the most interesting in view of IRV — even before the final hour of filing, when District 6 incumbent Bob Fine jumped into the at-large free-for-all, instead of seeking re-election to his current seat.

The field includes the three incumbent at-large commissioners: the Green Party’s Annie Young and DFLers Mary Merrill Anderson, a former superintendent, and current board president Tom Nordyke. Then there’s DFLer John Erwin, a one-term commissioner whose term ended in 2003, and three newcomers — John Butler, David Wahlstedt and Nancy Bernard — in addition to Fine. (Anderson, Nordyke and Erwin earned the DFL endorsement at the party’s city convention in May.)

Such multi-seat races were the most contentious topic when the Minnesota Supreme Court heard oral arguments May 13 in MVA’s effort to overturn IRV in Minneapolis. Justices asked both sides whether they could rule differently on the comparatively simple use of IRV in single-seat races and the more complex process in races in which candidates are vying for more than one seat.

If MVA were to field a candidate for the purposes of later filing a grievance, for which the court left an opening in its June 11 ruling, Massey said she expected it to be in one of the multi-seat races.

Photo: Chris Steller, Minnesota Independent

Two last-day filers

Besides Fine, notables who surprised ballot-watchers with their filings on Tuesday were former City Council Member Natalie Johnson Lee, who will try to return to her old post, and current park board commissioner Carol Kummer, whose planned retirement went awry when a chosen successor got sick.

But perhaps more typical of people who put off filing for office until the last day are relative political ingenues like Malone. A 30-year-old Northeast Minneapolis homeowner who designs websites for a living, Malone is passionate about dog parks.

While his name appears on a Supreme Court case over IRV (pdf), it’s another issue that inspired Malone to run for office — his belief that the city’s dog parks are “great, but there’s lots of room for improvement.”

He would like to reduce the $60 annual permit fee, which he says prevents some people from bringing their dogs to the parks.

A Peace Corps volunteer who served in Samoa, Malone’s main political experience was student government in college. That’s also the case for Butler, one of the contenders for the park board’s three at-large seats who also filed for office on Tuesday.

But that experience is further back for Butler, a retired postal service worker, who is 68. A self-described “ultra-conservative” aligned with the Minneapolis Property Rights Action Committee, Butler said his friend Bill McGaughey, a mayoral candidate, persuaded him to run.

“The honest truth,” Butler said, “is you caught me on the way to the library to read up on the park board and what they do.” He also expressed curiosity about park commissioners’ compensation.

A tennis player, Butler enjoys city parks but says they could be more “senior citizen-friendly. It wouldn’t hurt to put in a shuffle board.”

Candidates who change their minds have until Thursday at 5 p.m. to withdraw from city elections.

Source: Wikipedia

Riverview Community Bank in Otsego, Minn., has been cited by the FDIC in connection with “unsafe and unsound banking practices.” Former Secretary of State and current Rep. Mary Kiffmeyer, R-Big Lake, is an owner and director of the bank — a bank that founders say was inspired by the hand of God.

But it seems God hasn’t spared the bank from the national economic downtown. According to FDIC documents (PDF), Riverview invested heavily in real estate and was operating with too few reserves.

“The FDIC considered the matter and determined that it had reason to believe that the Bank had engaged in unsafe and unsound banking practices and violations of law and/or regulation,” according to the FDIC’s order to cease and desist certain lending practices until the unsound practices are rectified.

It cited Riverview with a number of regulation violations, including “operating with a board of directors that has failed to provide adequate supervision over and direction to the management of the Bank, engaging in hazardous lending and lax collection practices, operating with excessive loan losses and with an excessive level of adversely classified loans or assets, operating with inadequate liquidity in light of the Bank’s asset and liability mix and operating with an inadequate risk rating and loan review system.”

The bank is directed by the FDIC to take corrective action to remedy the issues giving the bank 30 to 60 days to implement a new loan review system and improve liquidity.

The bank made news when it was founded in 2003 after founder Chuck Ripka said he heard the voice of God say, “Chuck, if you do all the things I told you to do, I promise you I will take care of the bottom line.”

Ripka told the Pioneer Press in 2004 that 77 people had “invited Christ into their lives” and that 70 “physical healings” had occurred.

The Lord would make the bank such a success that Ripka would be compelled to “tell the truth about what God is doing here,” he said.

Ripka left the bank in 2006, but Kiffmeyer is still listed as director and owner according to campaign disclosure records.

From Growe’s op-ed:

Former Sen. Coleman has taken ample advantage of his rights to hold the results up to unprecedented scrutiny. So, while he and his supporters will surely be disappointed if he does not win his contest, they cannot claim that they were not afforded due process.

From Kiffmeyer’s letter to Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner:

Soliah is back in Minnesota, much to the chagrin of law enforcement officials and many citizens in California and Minnesota. Consequently, I am wondering, pursuant to our prior conversations, what, if anything, you intend to do with the case at this point. … [An investigation into alleged voting fraud] will send a message that it is important, and it sends a message to those who are legitimate that the system is working to protect your legitimate votes, too.”

Kiffmeyer told WCCO-TV she’s pursuing Olson because the U.S. Senate recount showed the importance of every vote. Gaertner responded that Olson had legally changed her name from Kathleen Soliah and voted legally as well — and that she’d told Kiffmeyer that in 1999.

Ritchie’s statement, from the Red Wing Republican Eagle (requires registration and fee), via Braublog via MnPublius:

Ritchie said he will lobby his wife for a second term in office, but rejected the idea of seeking higher office, noting some have urged a gubernatorial run.

“I’ve been pretty resistant to that,” he said, adding he prefers his current post, which Ritchie said “allows me to focus on the democracy itself.”

The Republican-sponsored bill would have required all Minnesota voters to have photo identification in order to vote. Only three other states have voter requirements that strict. The bill was carried by Reps. Tom Emmer, R-Delano, and former Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer, R-Big Lake. Both said the bill was intended to prevent voter fraud.

Secretary of State Mark Ritchie testified before the committee in opposition to the bill, Minnesota Public Radio reported.

To stamp out voter fraud, GOP legislators have offered a proposal that would make Minnesota’s voter-ID laws the most restrictive in the country. But according to their own party, no actual cases of voter fraud have been reported here. Still Reps. Tom Emmer, R-Delano, and Mary Kiffmeyer, R-Big Lake, have sponsored a bill requiring photo identification for every voter.

The Republican National Committee’s Minnesota voter fraud Web page announced, “There are no recent documented reports of vote fraud in this state.” And that’s with a recount of 2.9 million votes that took four months to scrutinize Minnesota’s election system.

But that hasn’t stopped Emmer or Kiffmeyer. “Voters want to know that their contribution to our enduring democracy will not be cancelled out through fraud or abuse,” wrote Emmer in a January opinion piece in the Pioneer Press. Kiffmeyer said at a late-January press conference on the bill that Minnesota’s voting system is vulnerable to fraudulent attacks unless a photo ID system is instituted.

“Mary Kiffmeyer should know better,” Hamline University professor David Schultz wrote today. “During her tenure as secretary of state she was unable to document any serious or widespread voter fraud. If fraud did exist, there is no indication that the current laws are ill-equipped to address the problem.”

“You can’t make this up!” reads the banner above the GOP’s results on Minnesota’s voter fraud. Apparently some in the GOP didn’t get that message.

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.”

“If there are wrongly rejected [ballots], then you also have to accept the fact that there are wrongly accepted [ballots],” she said. “And they never went there, they never went into wrongly accepted. They didn’t take a global look at everything.” She acknowledges that doing so would have meant opening a huge can of worms. “Once you stray off that,” she said, “where do you quit once you open that door?”

Seemed like a hypothetical question at the time, but Sunday’s Star Tribune makes it sound not moot at all:

In their fight to overturn the U.S. Senate recount, Norm Coleman’s legal team has begun pressing some Minnesota counties for documents on hundreds of thousands of ballots that were not previously disputed … casting a much wider net for other mistakes that could cost Franken votes. The latest requests, dealing with approved absentee ballots and precinct voter rosters, are frustrating some counties.

The Strib report continues:

“You’re talking 30,000, 40,000 pages of documents,” said Stearns County elections chief Dave Walz, referring to his county alone. Joe Mansky, Ramsey County’s election director, said the county has received requests for copies of “over 200,000 pieces of paper” from the campaigns.

The story doesn’t detail just how globally Coleman’s team is looking into Kiffmeyer’s can of worms, but that too may become clearer in a day or two.

It’s there, in the Dinkytown neighborhood on the edge of the University of Minnesota campus, that poll workers recorded 133 more votes than they have ballots to show for it. It’s also there that students trying to vote via Minnesota’s same-day registration process were turned away in a re-run of a major snafu at another campus polling place during the general election two years ago.

As the Minnesota Independent reported Nov. 25, residents at The Chateau student co-op highrise who tried to register at the polls on Election Day, using proof of residency issued by the building’s management office as a second form of ID, were turned away until as late as 5 p.m. For the MnIndy video accompanying that story, student Jill Stein told of returning to the polling place twice before giving up and voting at her parents’ home precinct in the suburbs. How many of the 290 students who live in The Chateau likewise made honest attempts but were ultimately unable to vote is anyone’s guess.

The Chateau fiasco is a direct descendant of a similar situation that happened nearby during the 2006 election, as Beth Fraser, government affairs director at the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office, explained in an interview with MnIndy last month. Residents of the Melrose Student Suites, an off-campus housing complex in the nearby Stadium Village area, likewise pay utilities as part of their rent, and poll workers rejected documentation from the building management as a form of ID.

Just as with Chateau residents this year, students from the Melrose who tried to register at the polls in 2006 had to wait until late on Election Day to cast their ballots. That’s when Hennepin County Judge Gary Larson ruled in favor of a petition from Melrose resident and first-year U of M student Greg Shaffer. Larson ordered election officials to accept the Melrose proof of residency and to keep the polling place open an hour later. In doing so, Larson overruled a decision by then-Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer to deny the students ballots.

The case had broader repercussions. The new secretary of state who won election in 2006, Mark Ritchie, wanted to take the office in a voter-positive direction after the Kiffmeyer-era policies that sometimes emphasized voter suppression. In the wake of the Melrose decision, his office “proposed and adopted
 rule changes to allow the use of the itemized rent statement in lieu of a 
utility bill,” Fraser wrote in an e-mail to MnIndy this week. As she tells it:

In 2008, a new proof of residence was authorized specifically to address the 
challenges of registering to vote by those whose utilities are included in 
their rent: a rent statement from a resident’s landlord that itemizes their 
utilities. The statement that the Chateau originally provided did not 
suffice, because it was not addressed to the student and did not itemize 
their utility expenses. Residents of the Chateau later received a revised
statement and used it to register to vote.

But despite Ritchie’s intention to resolve this kind of polling-place problem, the new rule came as a surprise to The Chateau’s management when they found out about it on Election Day, and the result was the same for students who were unable to vote for most of the day.

How does Ritchie’s office plan to avoid yet another repeat of the problem next time? Fraser writes:

This office will work with the Minnesota Multi Housing Association and student organizations to ensure that apartment building owners and students are familiar with what is needed in a rent statement that can be used in combination with a photo ID for the purpose of Election Day Registration.

The Minnesota Daily, in an editorial this week — following a news story that, like MnIndy’s, featured Chateau resident Jill Stein — recommended just such an approach to city election officials, reminding its student readers, “Your vote should count.”

But with the lost and missing votes in Minneapolis Precinct 1, Ward 3 already playing a central role in the current recount drama, more drastic proposals for Minnesota to get its election practices right are sure to be advanced.

Indeed, one already has: Ritchie’s rival for the DFL endorsement in 2006, Christian Sande, wrote an article earlier this year urging the state to consider following Wisconsin’s example and grant responsibility for managing elections to a commission of current and retired judges. It’s a move that could involve doing away with the office of secretary of state altogether.