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.”

That’s the message DFL state Sen. Ann Rest and Republican state Rep. Laura Brod had on MPR today for the breed of voters whose enigmatically marked ballots were on display during the recent Senate recount. Their cramped scribbles drew widespread derision from observers who apparently always colored inside the lines. State Canvassing Board members were often left scratching their heads at chicken-scratch markings as they tried to determine voter intent — a concept held sacred in state law.

But the ovals are apparently secure. The two state leaders, each with electoral reforms on her mind, sounded nonplussed unenthusiastic about the idea of changing ballot design to help more voters cast clear votes.

“I don’t think that the ballot itself is necessarily the problem,” Brod said. “It’s a pretty clear ballot. We’ve just got to get people to fill the circle in and do it right. That’s just a matter of education.”

For her part, Rest acknowledged that ”it is our obligation to find ways to make it easier for Minnesotans to vote in an election,” but said the solution to errant ballot markings is “increased and more sophisticated training of election judges.”

The currently prescribed two to three hours of training don’t prepare workers to handle a rush of voters, who, because “they’re very young or very old, are not paying attention and mark an X in a box rather than filling in an oval, she said.

“As we gain more experience with our paper ballot, that will become less of an issue,” Rest assured the radio audience.