Omar Jamal

A video of Somali youth harassing a gay man captured last week at the Twin Cities Pride Festival has garnered a lot of attention, spurred debate and spawned numerous press releases. Video author Justin Grey Day and the victim, Adam Schreifels, released videos responding to the debate over the incident. Politicians have denounced bias crimes [...]

Last night Omar Jamal, head of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center, told KSTP news that as many as 500 people were either persuaded or misled to vote for Al Franken at the Brian Coyle Center on Tuesday. The report raises serious questions about Jamal’s claims: Only two days ago Jamal told the same news station that complaints were coming from voters who said translators were persuading people to vote for Franken and Norm Coleman. He claimed that Franken and Coleman workers were, according to KSTP, trying to illegally influence a “few dozen” Somali voters. Suddenly that number has leapt to 500, and Jamal now says they were all persuaded to vote for Franken.

What’s more, though a Coleman staffer was on hand all day, Jamal now dismisses complaints that translators were influencing people to vote for Coleman and tells a reporter from M’shale that they “were lying.”

With Norm Coleman’s lead over Al Franken continuing to slip, allegations about vote-influencing at the Brian Coyle Center — a story the Minnesota Independent broke — has resulted in a complaint filed Friday with the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. Omar Jamal of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center says interpreters may have tried to influence Somalis [...]