Secretary Of State

The Republican Party of Minnesota has released a new website and radio ad targeting Secretary of State Mark Ritchie during the National Civic Summit, Ritchie’s retooling of the annual meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State, held in Minneapolis this week.
Through its new site, RitchieFacts.com, the GOP claims Ritchie is a partisan, that [...]

It was a part of a Minnesota Supreme Court order that few could love. Last month the campaigns of Al Franken and Norm Coleman got the right, by a 3-2 court ruling, to reject absentee ballots in the state’s Senate recount that election officials had determined were lawfully cast.

And reject they did, leaving about 400 individual voters with only one way to re-enfranchise themselves: by filing a lawsuit of their own. But they have to do it by Jan. 12, and it could cost as much as $5,000 per voter.

Norm Coleman’s attorneys vowed to go to court to make up the ground the incumbent Republican lost today after more than 900 absentee ballots that had been mistakenly rejected were tallied, increasing Democratic challenger Al Franken’s lead for Coleman’s U.S. Senate seat to 225. “We’ll take whatever legal action … to remedy this artificial lead,” said Coleman recount attorney Fritz Knaak.

“I’ve had better days,” Knaak conceded. “The numbers are what they are.” But he repeated that the “process was broken” and predicted that “the election will still be called in Coleman’s favor.”

Here, direct from Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie himself, are the dates and times of a dozen public meetings on the U.S. Senate recount to be held on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday this week at locations around the state. At these regional meetings, the campaigns of Al Franken and U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman will [...]

Friday afternoon as Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie was lauding the work of the State Canvassing Board…
We just finished a very successful week. … It feels great. … The nation can heal from the mess in Florida where the recount was stopped.
… the campaign of U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman was at the Minnesota Supreme [...]

It can’t be coincidence that the Al Franken for Senate campaign pledged today to reduce its pending ballot challenges in the ongoing statewide Senate recount to fewer than 500 by Tuesday. On Friday, Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie estimated that the State Canvassing Board could only evaluate 1,000 such ballots in the four days it [...]

Minneapolis Precinct 1, Ward 3 is now the latest and greatest Ground Zero of messed-up election practices to be exposed during Minnesota’s statewide recount in the U.S. Senate contest between Democrat Al Franken and Republican incumbent Norm Coleman. 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 last month were turned away — in a re-run of a major snafu at another campus polling place during the last general election two years ago.

Eighty-eight big name environmental and food activists — including Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan, famed restaurant owner Alice Waters and Minnesotan Winona LaDuke — have written to President-elect Barack Obama urging him to appoint America’s first “sustainability Secretary of Agriculture.” And among their list of six candidates they include Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a former employee of Minnesota’s ag department and co-founder of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

The main story so far in Minnesota’s statewide election recount — besides incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman’s continuing slim lead over Democratic challenger Al Franken and the role of wrongly rejected absentee ballots — has been how the unexpectedly large numbers of ballot challenges from both campaigns have affected the recount’s running vote tally. By questioning election officials on 27 of every 10,000 ballots cast for either man, the campaigns have temporarily removed nearly 6,000 votes from the official recount totals, leaving Coleman in command (for the moment) of a 344-vote advantage. But take one statistic from Monday’s recount action — Coleman challenged 35 more ballots than did Franken — and extrapolate it across eight days of a recount that’s now nine-tenths done, and you can show, on paper at least, how Coleman’s ballot-challenge lead could account for his lead in the running tally of overall votes.

The twin stacks of recounted ballots for Al Franken and Norm Coleman, each nearing a million votes in height Tuesday night, are like the mattresses piled high in the fable “The Princess and the Pea.” Franken has 976,187 to Coleman’s 978,751 — only a 0.0011 percent difference out of the total 2,354,080 recounted so far, according to official figures. In Hans Christian Andersen’s story, the princess’s sleeplessness at night and bruises by morning — all from a tiny pea many mattresses below her — are proof of her royalty. In Minnesota’s recount story, neither man rests well, tossing and turning because at the bottom of each pile lies a growing bundle of the other man’s challenged ballots.