voter intimidation

The Minnesota Secretary of State’s office says that if Coleman staffer Mahoumad Wardere was on site at Brian Coyle Center for most of the afternoon that Minnesota election laws were “potentially” broken. According to Beth Fraser, director of governmental affairs at the Secretary of State’s office, an interpreter can only be inside a polling place if they are assisting a specific voter. They cannot remain onsite, as we reported Wardere did, acting as a go-to interpreter.

Earlier today, three voters of Somali origin at the Brian Coyle Center in Minneapolis told me — and two told an election observer — that a translator working there was instructing people to vote for Sen. Norm Coleman.

In addition, the presence of a Coleman staffer who says he came to volunteer his services as a GOP challenger or translator also stirred controversy between election judges and challengers.

In a video released today by the UpTake, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie outlined allegations of voter intimidation by Minnesota Majority. Ritchie revealed during a press conference on Wednesday that someone working for Minnesota Majority president Jeff Davis was phoning voters and posing as a representative of the Secretary of State’s office. We wrote about the group’s tactics last week, exposing how their attempts at questioning the integrity of Minnesota’s voter rolls was, according to Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann, one of the ways the conservative organization was trying to suppress votes in Democrat-leaning counties.

Learn more about the lawsuit here, and watch the video by the UpTake of the press conference and Minnesota Majority’s ties to former SoS Mary Kiffmeyer after the jump.