Through its new site, RitchieFacts.com, the GOP claims Ritchie is a partisan, that he thought Norm Coleman would try to win the U.S. Senate election at any cost, and that Ritchie “partnered with liberal attack blog” The Uptake, the nonprofit news site that offered free, live web video of the U.S. Senate recount proceedings.

GOP deputy chair Michael Brodkorb — who, prior to starting his current job, leveled some of the same charges at his own attack blog, Minnesota Democrats Exposed  — said in a statement Thursday, “Over the next 16 months, we are going to hold Mark Ritchie accountable for his actions, and we are going to make sure Minnesotans know the truth about his record.”

GOP party chair Tony Sutton, also in a statement, said, “With secretaries of state from all over the United States convening in Minneapolis this week, I hope they aren’t looking to Mark Ritchie for leadership. I want the visiting secretaries of state to know the truth about Ritchie’s record. Mark Ritchie is not a subject matter expert on fair and open elections.”

One top Republican, Politics in Minnesota’s Sarah Janecek might take issue with that. In naming Ritchie 2008 “Politician of the Year,” she wrote, “We dare anyone to find one public statement made by Ritchie during the recount that was partisan in favor of Franken. It cannot be done, because Ritchie didn’t do it, and we — and many others — were carefully looking for one. Our historically partisan Democrat Secretary of State proved to be a nonpartisan statesman.”

Despite the word “facts” in the GOP website’s name, nearly half of the sources at RitchieFacts.com are from opinion pieces; the most-cited source is the much-criticized Wall Street Journal editorial, “Mischief in Minnesota?”

The DFL offered a response to the attacks today.

“The eight-month Senate election that just wrapped up showed that Minnesota’s elections are transparent, accurate, and fair. Minnesotans are indeed proud of our elections system and with the election officials entrusted with conducting it,” said DFL party chair Brian Melendez. “Our state and its citizens are facing real problems, but our election system isn’t one of them.”

Melendez continued, “As the Republicans were spinning out their smear campaign, Secretary Ritchie organized a day of democratic participation and brought citizens together with elected officials to take on some of the difficult issues facing our state and nation,” he said. “And while the Republicans focus on petty attacks, our DFL leaders are focused on jobs, on health-care reform, and on helping Minnesota’s communities and citizens cope with the consequences of Governor Pawlenty’s unallotments.”

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, according to courtesy letters the Secretary of State Mark Ritchie sent Jan. 7. And the price tag (don’t call it a poll tax) could be as high as $5,000 per voter, according to one local attorney with experience in election law.

Charles Shreffler, who before leaving private practice was one of the few local attorneys handling election law cases (for Republicans, he says), estimated in an interview today that the cost of an election contest would be at least $2,500 and more likely in the $3,000–$5,000 range. “It’s not rocket science,” he said of the legal work required, but the relative scarcity of specialists in the field — and the fact that many are already engaged by one side or the other in the Minnesota Senate recount — might play into the price.

The lawsuit Coleman’s campaign filed on Jan. 6 also took the form of an election contest, but one with a much wider scope than those that individuals receiving the letter from Bert Black, Ritchie’s legal adviser, would bring. Ritchie griped publicly about the Supreme Court’s ruling several times in the closing weeks of the recount, wondering aloud how a soldier in Baghdad whose valid absentee ballot a campaign vetoed would manage to file an election contest from the other side of the world.

The campaigns didn’t know what the votes were on the ballots they rejected; they only saw the outside envelopes that carried the absentee voters’ names and addresses. But campaign representatives had fairly wide latitude, as long as they completed a form giving a reason for each rejection.

“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.”

That will happen, Coleman attorney Tony Trimble said, when hundreds of absentee ballots that the campaign still wants reviewed are opened and counted. “We’re still trying to ferret out for counting these 600 ballots,” he said, adding that fixing more than 100 allegedly double-counted ballots in Minneapolis would help Coleman as well.

Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said he expected that the State Canvassing Board would declare a result of the election on Monday — a result that seems all but certain to favor Franken.

“I’m also not happy that the two campaigns had the right to veto” once-rejected absentee ballots that local officials, on review, determined should be counted — referring to a controversial Dec. 18 state Supreme Court ruling that only absentee ballots that election officials and campaign representatives could agree upon should be counted.

Attorneys for Franken and Coleman inspect ballots (The Uptake)

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 hash out with county election officials which of as many as 1,600 wrongly rejected absentee ballots should be included in the final vote tally. That’s in accordance with a state Supreme Court order that gave the two campaigns a role in deciding whether uncounted absentee ballots that local officials have determined were turned aside for no valid reason should be opened and counted.

Mark your calendars and make your travel plans for the dates and times listed after the jump. These are the regional recount meetings mentioned but not listed in the Dec. 27 Star Tribune. Check back for an update as to whether The Uptake will provide online video for any of these meetings. Note that the meetings in Beltrami and Dakota counties will take place over two days. The last meeting on the list, at the Secretary of State’s office in St. Paul, is the occasion for opening the ballots that all parties have agreed at the regional meetings should be counted.

TUESDAY, DEC. 30
County Board Room, St. Louis County Courthouse
100 N. Fifth Ave., Duluth, Minn.
9 a.m.

Beltrami County Board Room, County Administration Building
701 Minnesota Ave., Bemidji, Minn. 
10 a.m.–3 p.m.

Council Board Chambers and Conference Room 1, Olmsted County Government Center
151 Fourth St. SE, Rochester, Minn.
1 p.m.

Kandiyohi County Government Center
2200 23rd St. NE, Willmar, Minn.
1:30 p.m.

County Board Room, Sherburne County Government Center
13880 Highway 10, Elk River, Minn.
8:30 a.m.

Room 710, Anoka County Government Center
2100 Third Ave., Anoka, Minn.
9 a.m.

Dakota County Board Room
1590 Highway 55, Hastings, Minn.
1 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 31

Dakota County Board Room
1590 Highway 55, Hastings, Minn.
9 a.m. (continued from Tuesday)

Location to be determined, Wright County
Buffalo, Minn.
9 a.m.

First Floor Auditorium, Blue Earth County Government Center
410 S. Fifth St., Mankato, Minn.
10 a.m.–4 p.m.

Multiple rooms, Otter Tail County Government Service Center
500 W. Fir Ave., Fergus Falls, Minn.
9 a.m.

Meeting Rooms 1 and 2, Crow Wing County Land Services Building
322 Laurel St., Brainerd, Minn.
10 a.m.

Room to be determined, Polk County Government Center
612 N. Broadway, Suite 207, Crookston, Minn.
10 a.m.

FRIDAY, JAN. 2

Beltrami County Board Room, County Administration Building
701 Minnesota Ave., Bemidji, Minn.
10 a.m.–3 p.m. (second meeting)

180 State Office Building, Secretary of State’s Office
100 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd., St. Paul
10 a.m.

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 Court for the second time in a day, asking for an emergency temporary restraining order against the State Canvassing Board.

The Coleman camp’s motion (pdf) asks the state’s high court to stop the canvassing board from rejecting its challenges to ballots damaged badly enough to require duplicates to be made so vote counting machines could read their votes on Election Day. They’re supposed to be attached to each other, and Coleman alleges that instances in which only the original or duplicate can now be found suggest that both may have mistakenly been tabulated during the recount. The state Supreme Court (pdf) set a Tuesday afternoon date to hear the motion, which also asks the court to prevent the canvassing board from certifying a result that includes alleged duplicate votes.

The legal action was triggered by the canvassing board’s decision Friday that it could not evaluate challenges that would require them to gather facts about the alleged double-counting of duplicate ballots. That must be taken up elsewhere — meaning the courts — asserted the board members. The board, besides Ritchie, consists of two Ramsey County District Court judges and a pair of justices from the state Supreme Court (one of whom is its chief, and both of whom have so far recused themselves from hearing canvassing board-related cases).

Meanwhile, Ritchie sounded buoyant at a press conference after the canvassing board finished its day’s work in the middle of the afternoon rather than, as was recently the plan, laboring into the evening. Aided by massive withdrawals of challenged ballots by the Coleman and Al Franken campaigns early in the week, the board progressively quickened to a sometimes breakneck pace its review of those ballots, dispensing with what Ritchie said were “almost all” of an originally overwhelming stack of 6,655 challenged ballots in three and a half days.

Certifying a result — the board’s ultimate task — is “still a ways away,” Ritchie acknowledged, especially in view of Thursday’s state Supreme Court order, in response to another Coleman petition, giving counties until Dec. 31 to transmit to the board their wrongly rejected absentee ballots.

But next week’s will be a comparatively light schedule to address three issues: voter-intent questions on the remaining 100-some duplicate ballots; various discrepancies arising from the reconciling of lists of withdrawals and challenges, and the now court-mandated process of counting an estimated 1,600 wrongly rejected absentee ballots.

“We’re on track to do Minnesota proud,” Ritchie said.

UPDATE: The Norm Coleman camp says they’ll trim their ballot challenges to “somewhere south of 1,000.” 

With two unanimous votes going its way at the board’s Friday meeting but rival U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman petitioning the state Supreme Court for delay, the Franken campaign is eager to please the board and help things proceed according to plan. One hitch: Tit-for-tat mass withdrawals to bring the challenged-ballot count down from a combined high of 6,655 to a manageable number may be welcome and all, but even processing the withdrawals means extra work for dog-tired election officials.

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.

The 88 signatories — which includes Minnesotans like restaurant owner Lucia Watson, IATP president Jim Harkness and Susan Stokes, head of the Farmers Legal Action Group, among others — write that the secretary’s vision should encompass: “recreating regional food systems, supporting the growth of humane, natural and organic farms, and protecting the environment, biodiversity and the health of our children while implementing policies that place conservation, soil health, animal welfare and worker’s rights as well as sustainable renewable energy near the top of their agenda.”

Update: Ritchie tells MnIndy he’s not interested in the ag secretary job “at this point in time.”

The six suggested candidates and the letter’s text:

1. Gus Schumacher, former Under Secretary of Agriculture for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services and former Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture.
2. Chuck Hassebrook, executive director, Center for Rural Affairs, Lyons, Neb.
3. Sarah Vogel, former Commissioner of Agriculture for North Dakota, lawyer, Bismarck, N.D.
4. Fred Kirschenmann, organic farmer, distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Ames, Iowa, and president of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Pocantico Hills, NY.
5. Mark Ritchie, Minnesota Secretary of State, former policy analyst in Minnesota’s Department of Agriculture under Governor Rudy Perpich, co-founder of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.
6. Neil Hamilton, Dwight D. Opperman Chair of Law and director of the Agricultural Law Center, Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.

Read the full letter:

Dear President-Elect Obama,

We congratulate you on your historic victory and welcome the change that your election promises to usher in for our nation. As leaders in the sustainable agriculture and rural advocacy community we supported you in record numbers during the caucus, primary and general election because of the family farm-friendly p olicies that you advocated during your campaign.

As our nation’s future president, we hope that you will take our concerns under advisement when nominating our next Secretary of Agriculture because of the crucial role this Secretary will play in revitalizing our rural economies, protecting our nation’s food supply and our environment, improving human health and well-being, rescuing the independent family farmer, and creating a sustainable renewable energy future.

We believe that our nation is at a critical juncture in regard to agriculture and its impact on the environment and that our next Secretary of Agriculture must have a broad vision for our collective future that is greater than what past appointments have called for.

Presently, farmers face serious challenges in terms of the high costs of energy, inputs and land, as well as continually having to fight an economic system and legislative policies that undermine their ability to compete in the open market. The current system unnaturally favors economies of scale, consolidation and market concentration and the allocation of massive subsidies for commodities, all of which benefit the interests of corporate agribusiness over the livelihoods of farm families.

In addition, America must come to understand the environmental and human health implications of industrialized agriculture. From rising childhood and adult obesity to issues of food safety, global warming and air and water pollution, we believe our next Secretary of Agriculture must have a vision that calls for: recreating regional food systems, supporting the growth of humane, natural and organic farms, and protecting the environment, biodiversity and the health of our children while implementing policies that place conservation, soil health, animal welfare and worker’s rights as well as sustainable renewable energy near the top of their agenda.

Today we have a nutritional and environmental deficit that is as real and as great as that of our national debt and must be addressed with forward thinking and bold, decisive action. To deal with this crisis, our next Secretary of Agriculture must work to advance a new era of sustainability in agriculture, humane husbandry, food and renewable energy production that revitalizes our nation’s soil, air and water while stimulating opportunities for new farmers to return to the land.

We believe that a new administration should address our nation’s growing health problems by promoting a children’s school lunch program that incorporates more healthy food choices, including the creation of opportunities for schools to purchase food from local sources that place a high emphasis on nutrition and sustainable farming practices. We recognize that our children’s health is our nation’s future and that currently schools are unable to meet these needs because they do not have the financial resources to invest in better food choices. We believe this reflects and is in line with your emphasis on childhood education as a child’s health and nutrition are fundamental to their academic success.

We understand that this is a tall order, but one that is consistent with the values and policies that you advocated for in your bid for the White House. We realize that more conventional candidates are likely under consideration; however, we feel strongly that the next head of the USDA should have a significant grassroots background in promoting sustainable agriculture to create a prosperous future for rural America and a healthy future for all of America’s citizens.

With this in mind, we are offering a list of leaders who have demonstrated a commitment to the goals that you articulated during your campaign and we encourage you to consider them for the role of Secretary of Agriculture.

Signatories:

1. David Murphy, Clear Lake, IA
2. Paul Willis, Thornton, IA
3. Michael Pollan, Berkeley, CA
4. Bill Niman, Bolinas, CA
5. Nicolette Hahn Niman, Bolinas, CA
6. Diane Halverson, Northfield, MN
7. Marlene Halverson, Northfield, MN
8. Aaron Woolf, Elizabethtown, NY
9. Judy Wicks, Philadelphia, PA
10. Wendy Wasserman, Iowa City, IA
11. Anna Lappé, Brooklyn, NY
12. Cornelia Butler Flora, Ames, IA
13. Eleanor Bertino, San Francisco, CA
14. Wes Jackson, Salina, KS
15. Wendell Berry, Port Royal, KY
16. Alice Waters, Berkeley, CA
17. Marion Nestle, New York, NY
18. Bill McKibben, Middlebury, VT
19. Rick Dove, New Bern, NC
20. Ann Cooper, Berkeley, CA
21. Michel Nischan, Fairfield, CT
22. Jerry DeWitt, Ames, IA
23. Michael Dimock, San Francisco, CA
24. Jim Harkness, Minneapolis, MN
25. Frank Reese, Lindsborg, KS
26. Jeff Odefey, Irvington, NY
27. Cathy Liss, Alexandria, VA
28. Eric Schlosser, Monterey, CA
29. Leigh Adcock, Ames, IA
30. Dan Barber, Pocantico Hills, NY
31. Francis Thicke, Fairfield, IA
32. Josh Viertel, Brooklyn, NY
33. Peter Hoffman, New York, NY
34. Tom Philpott, Valle Crucis, NC
35. Hillary Wilson, Valle Crucis, NC
36. Dan Imhoff, Healdsburg, CA
37. Michael Stumo, Sheffield, MA
38. Simran Sethi, Lawrence, KS
39. Lisa Stokke, Clear Lake, IA
40. Sarah Willis, Thornton, IA
41. Peter Kaminsky, Brooklyn, NY
42. Kurt Michael Friese, Iowa City, IA
43. Carl Safina, Stony Brook, NY
44. Anthony Garrett, Washington, DC
45. Eliza Maclean, Snow Camp, NC
46. Odessa Piper, Silver Spring, MD
47. Edward Behr, Barnet, VT
48. Phyllis Willis, Thornton, IA
49. Larry Cleverley, Mingo, IA
50. Jesse Ziff Cool, Menlo Park, CA
51. Curt Ellis, Austin, TX
52. Wenonah Hauter, Washington, D C
53. Patty Lovera, Washington, DC
54. John Ikerd, Columbia, MO
55. Lucia Watson, Minneapolis, MN
56. Deborah Madison, Galisteo, NM
57. George DeVault, Decorah, IA
58. Melanie DeVault, Decorah, IA
59. Andrea King Collier, Lansing, MI
60. Rosiland Creasy, Los Altos, CA
61. John Jeavons, Willits, CA
62. Samuel Fromartz, Washington DC
63. Frances Moore Lappe, Cambridge, MA
64. Denise O’Brien, Atlantic, IA
65. Arnell Hinkle, Berkeley, CA
66. Marjie Bender, Pittsboro, NC
67. Winona LaDuke, Ponsford, MN
68. Diane Hatz, New York, NY
69. Cory Schreiber, Portland, OR
70. Rick Bayless, Chicago, IL
71. Angie Tagtow, Elkhart, IA
72. Ralph Paige, East Point, GA
73. Clara Bingham, New York, NY
74. Arie McFarlen, Dell Rapids, SD
75. Bret Kortie, Dell Rapids, SD
76. Dwight Ault, Austin, MN
77. Amy P. Goldman, Rhinebeck, NY
78. Judith LaBelle, New York, NY
79. Patrick Martins, New York, NY
80. Mary Berry Smith, New Castle, KY
81. John Fisk, East Lansing, MI
82. Tim LaSalle, Kutztown, PA
83. Susan Stokes, St. Paul, MN
84. Jude Becker, Dyersville, IA

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 shelf life of such computations, however — like the shelf life of the candidates’ ballot challenges on which they’re based — is limited. There’s a Dec. 5 deadline for counties to complete their recount responsibilities and a Dec. 16 date for the State Canvassing Board to begin aggregating the counties’ handiwork, including the critical task of sorting out the challenged ballots.

In the meantime, the canvassing board may also decide what if anything it will do about examining an estimated 12,000 rejected absentee ballots for legitimate votes that should have been counted.

Most counties are already done with their parts in the state’s recount, but some have yet to start. On Tuesday only Hennepin, Ramsey and Dodge counties will be recounting, according to The Uptake, which closely tracks counties’ efforts. On Wednesday, Rock, Wright, Scott and Winona counties will begin their recounts.

In Hans Christian Andersen’s story, the princess’ 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. Franken can brag of a bigger bruise caused by Coleman’s 1,836 challenges, but Franken’s forces have challenged 1,758 ballots that sure make Coleman sore.

Who is the real princess? Coleman has 238 more votes than Franken as of 8 p.m. Tuesday, according to Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie’s office. It has to be one of these jokers.

A more interesting question might be who is the real queen. Which person or body will determine who is Minnesota senatorial royalty? Is it the four wise men and one wise woman of the State Canvassing Board, who meet Wednesday morning on whether they can count rejected absentee ballots? Or is it Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who may name someone to fill a senatorial absence? Or the U.S. Senate itself, or a judge or judges somewhere?

The only thing that’s certain is that Hans C. Andersen lost the governorship to Ole Rolvaag in 1962 in the last Great Minnesota Recount. Check your storybooks.