Challengers huddled across the street from the Dinkytown polling place. Photo: Chris Steller, MnIndy

They went there to ensure that nobody was wrongfully turned away from a Minneapolis polling place infamous for electoral mishaps. They ended up across the street, with police threatening arrest them if they set foot inside again.

On Tuesday night, election officials accused two men at a Minneapolis polling place of disturbing the voting process. Each had been officially designated by Ward Three council candidates to keep an eye on the proceedings at the University Lutheran Church of Hope, a short walk from the heart of the University of Minnesota campus-area commercial district known as Dinkytown.

The election judges ejected the challengers at about 6 p.m. Citing witnesses’ claims about raised-voiced disruptions, police refused to allow the challengers back inside.

But it’s not the first instance of election-day mishaps there: It’s the same polling place where 133 ballots went missing last year during the Franken-Coleman U.S. Senate recount. And it’s the same site where student residents were turned away from the polls despite having proof-of-residency documents that had allowed them to register to vote there in past years.

With those troubles in mind, candidates hoping to replace incumbent Council Member Diane Hofstede posted official challengers there Tuesday. (While other states have poll watchers, Minnesota’s election law terms candidates’ representatives who monitor polling-place activity “challengers.”)

Tensions between election officials and candidate challengers came to a head after a man who owns a house across the street was twice turned away with proof of residency documents deemed inadequate for same-day registration.

William Wells, a challenger for Republican Jeffrey Cobia, says he reminded officials about the missing ballots from last fall. Ryan Ahlberg, an attorney who DFLer Allen Kathir had designated as his official challenger, asserted his right to talk to voters about their eligibility to vote.

Election judges refused comment, but Ahlberg said they argued that challengers could only object to voters’ qualifications, not discuss options for proving residency.

First two and then three police officers arrived, kicking out the challengers as well as, in due course, a pair of reporters who had been alerted to the situation by Kathir.

The conflict spilled out of the church as darkness, rain and the temperature were falling.

Two squad cars idled empty for about an hour while officers spoke by phone with city officials, occasionally emerging to ask the challengers what they intended to do next.

One challenger asked police exactly what would happen should he try to re-enter the polling place. The answer: He’d get a citizen’s arrest warrant for trespassing and a trip downtown to Hennepin County jail that would last six to eight hours.

Ironically, that challenger was Ahlberg and not the representative of candidate Melissa Hill, who ran under the “Civil Disobedience” banner. Hill told the Minnesota Independent she isn’t sure the volunteer who offered to monitor voting for her in Dinkytown ever showed up.

In the end, Kathir appointed his campaign manager, Rick Brundage, to act as challenger for the 45 minutes of voting that remained.

Ahlberg and Wells said at least four to six people attempted to vote during the course of the day but were turned away and did not return.

By Kathir’s estimate that amounted to about 10 percent of the precinct’s total turnout.

The dispute over, Kathir returned to his get-out-the-vote efforts, shuttling students from nearby blocks to the church before the 8 p.m. close of polls.

Hofstede prevailed with 1,485 first-choice votes, to Kathir’s 348 and Cobia’s 242.

Hill had 112.

She was the star attraction at a press conference Monday morning in Pittsburgh with four other journalists who were arrested and say their equipment was intentionally damaged. According to a joint press release by Twin Cities and Pittsburgh Indymedia, the Glass Bead Collective and the Thomas Merton Center, at least six journalists were arrested, including one other Minneapolis-based Indymedia reporter.

Update: According to Twin Cities Indymedia reporter Nigel Parry, Nathan Monkelien is the other local arrested in Pittsburgh. He’s still in jail on $8,000 bail and faces two felony aggravated assault charges, a level-3 misdemeanor for disorderly conduct, and a level-2 misdemeanor for resisting arrest and failure to disperse. Monkelien was carrying a camera, he adds, and was swept up in the same arrests as Hill, who was released from jail.

Here’s an interview with Hill posted at YouTube. You can also follow her exploits with Keystone State cops (and other G20 law enforcement) at Twitter and Facebook.

Minneapolis City Council candidates Allen Kathir and Melissa Hill. Photos courtesy of the candidates

New in Minneapolis: Every candidate in the running for a city office stays in the race through the general election on Nov. 3.

That’s no biggie for the kind of candidates who in past years could be confident of a first- or second-place primary-election finish. But for many lesser-known candidates, it may be the most significant element of the city’s new instant-runoff voting system (IRV).

With nearly 100 candidates having filed for city offices, IRV could theoretically trigger tallying of voters’ lower-ranked preferences in as many as 22 races. But most seats will probably still be won by a single candidate with a majority of votes. Those results won’t trigger IRV, meaning no second-round suspense for runners-up hoping to leapfrog into the lead past front-runners who hold mere plurality leads.

A typical race is in the city’s Ward 3, which drew five city council candidates this year — as it did last time, for an open seat in 2005. Then, only DFL endorsee Diane Hofstede and Green-backed Aaron Neumann survived the primary and campaigned into November.

This year, Hofstede (now the incumbent, again the DFL endorsee) must contend for three more months with all four of her challengers: Libertarian Raymond Wilson Rolfe, Republican Jeffrey Cobia, DFLer Allen Kathir, and Melissa Hill, who is running under the banner of “Civil Disobedience.”

Due to personal circumstances, Hill isn’t able to run the full-bore campaign she had planned on earlier in the year — when, she says, she was courted by several political parties, including the Greens.

But thanks to IRV and the lack of a primary election, Hill is guaranteed time to get out her message about the value of political protest and civil liberties.

Hill was among the 100 arrested in downtown Minneapolis after the Rage Against the Machine concert during the Republican National Convention (RNC) last year.

“They shouldn’t be mass-arresting people. It’s completely bogus,” Hill said. “People in power were complacent when that happened.”

Hill went on to volunteer with the Community RNC Arrestee Support Structure (CRASS) and organize protests against the Federal Reserve Bank.

Now she wants to “promote the idea of civil disobedience — and use electoral politics to do that.”

Running for election was already a cheap megaphone — “Filing for office only costs $20,” Hill notes — but under IRV it’s an even better value.

So far, Hill’s effort is focused on a few Facebook pages. Kathir, the DFL challenger, is on Facebook, too, but he also has a full-fledged campaign website up and running — on solar power, even. (He’s trying to run a carbon-neutral campaign.)

There he sports a broader platform than Hill’s: community and public safety, the environment, the economy, housing, and responsiveness to constituents. But like Hill, Kathir was motivated by a personal experience with city government — in his case, his service on the Minneapolis Commission on Civil Rights.

Cutting the commission off at the knees by eliminating its complaint investigations unit is a rare action that both Mayor R.T. Rybak and Gov. Tim Pawlenty approve. Kathir said he is disappointed in the mayor’s stance.

An engineer by trade, Kathir brings a scientist’s eye to the campaign, noting that IRV is “definitely the wild card in this election.” The challenge, he said, is educating voters that “it’s not just important who your first choice is.”

Still, the math of IRV — counting second-choice votes on a second round of counting if no one gets a majority of first-choice votes in the first time around — isn’t a ticket into office for a candidate without majority appeal.

“You’re not really going to be able to sneak by,” Kathir said.

Hofstede, who garnered majority votes in both the primary and general elections in 2005, sounded nonplussed about the prospect of facing multiple opponents for 12 more weeks. Her worry about IRV was a more commonly cited concern: voter education.

“There will be confusion with the election,” Hofstede said. “The information that’s coming out is not consistent.”