A bill requiring voter identification cards, electronic rosters and a slew of other changes to election laws was heard in the House Government Operations and Election committee Thursday. A large number of groups testified that the bill would disenfranchise voters, especially students, the elderly and the disabled, while several testified that the bill is needed to prevent voter fraud. A presentation by Rep. Mary Kiffmeyer on the technological improvements her bill would make to the voting process was derailed when the hearing room technology failed.

“You need a photo ID to buy alcohol, cigarettes, drive a car to the polling place,” said Rep. Mike Benson, a Republican from Rochester. Benson is the author of one of two bill introduced in the Minnesota House that would require photo identification for voting. Benson said his bill is intended to prevent voter fraud.

“It is very easy to impersonate someone if you don’t have to show identification,” he said. “More and more you hear questions about the real integrity of the system.”

Former Secretary of State and current Republican Rep. Kiffmeyer offered another more expansive photo identification bill that would include an electronic system that scans IDs at the polling place.

She said it was simple technology “that will help take some of the burden off of election workers.”

But, a technological glitch prevented a short video that Kiffmeyer has planned to show. “It’s something with the House technology here. We will save the video for Tuesday, Madame Chair,” Kiffmeyer said. The committee will be continuing testimony on the bill on Tuesday.

Fraud prevention?

Dan MacGrath, executive director of Minnesota Majority, a group that pushed for the Kiffmeyer bill and was led by Kiffmeyer several years ago, said that Minnesota’s election system is “concerning.”

“I hope that other states do not adopt our system,” he said.

He decried the state’s same-day registration because he says it requires less information than what’s needed to register prior to election day.

“It’s an injustice to grant preferential treatment and trust to some voters just because they decide to register at the last minute,” he said.

Dale Erickson of Blaine, who was a recount observer for the campaign of Sen. Norm Coleman, said, “It’s been in the last 10 or 15 years that the integrity of the system has been called into question.”

He said the bill would prevent non-citizens from voting. “Previous speakers have been talking about residency as if it were the same thing as citizenship. We have to know if you are eligible to vote because you are a citizen.”

Laura Norlander, an election judge who has Republican ties, said, “This was my first time to be an election judge in 2010. It was an eye opener to receive the training and realize how many opportunities for voter fraud in our system.”

But that voter fraud doesn’t seem to have materialized. Last fall, the Minnesota County Attorneys Association called allegations of voter fraud in Minnesota “frivolous” and that only 26 people had been convicted of voting as a felon in the last two years.

Teresa Nelson, legal counsel for the ACLU of Minnesota told the committee that two close elections, in 2008 and 2010, “have not led to a single conviction for voter impersonation fraud — the only type of voter fraud that photo ID requirements could possibly address.”

“Moreover,” she added, “there were only 26 felon voting convictions out of 2.9 million voters. Contrast that miniscule number with the thousands of voters who may be disenfranchised because of a new photo ID requirement.”

She said the bill would appear to violate the Constitution.

“Supporters of Jim Crow justified their voter suppresion laws as equal treatment of all voters,” she told the committee. “Vote no on this voter suppression bill.”

Too costly?

Mike Dean, executive director of Common Cause Minnesota, said that the bill would prevent people from voting.

“This does not make sense when we could have improved our system by implementing the registration modernization bill that Gov. Pawlenty vetoed last year,” he said.

He pointed out that Utah, a very Republican state, recently enacted a similar system to the one vetoed by Gov. Tim Pawlenty and did it with support of both Democrats and Republicans. Minnesota should follow the lead of Utah’s system, Dean said, instead of “wasting time playing partisan politics.”

Dean also said the bill would cost the state too much money at a time of a massive budget deficit.

The cost issue is one that other states are grappling with as Republicans move to implement the same system outside Minnesota as well. The Institute for Southern Studies released a report this week on a similar initiative in North Carolina and found that the state simply couldn’t afford it. The costs associated with a voter ID program would include a massive publicity campaign to ensure all citizens know about the new law, training programs for elected officials and the cost to the state to create voter ID cards for residents who cannot afford to pay for them.

All told, North Carolina would pay out $18 to $25 million over the next three years if the bill passed. The institute found costs associated with a similar plan in Missouri to be close to $20 million. “Lawmakers routinely failed to include at least one basic expense needed to implement a voter ID law in their cost estimates, such as voter education,” ISS reported.

Disenfranchised voters

Advocates for students, battered women, the elderly and the disabled told the committee that the bill would have significant impacts on those populations as well.

Mary Lou Hill, a 94-year old member of the League of Women Voters, was concerned about the effect of the bill on seniors. She said she was born four years before the 19th amendment gave women the right to vote.

“I believe the right to vote is among our most important rights,” she said. “Whatever the authors’ intentions, the effect of the bills would be to take the vote away from United States citizens.”

She said the bill’s requirement that all voters obtain a photo ID from the Department of Public Safety would be an obstacle to older voters.

“It is easy for one of you to run down to the government center and to update your drivers license. Senior citizens may have a number of problems with this simple activity. They might not drive and might not have anyone to take them.”

“There’s no question these bills will disenfranchise thousands of senior citizens.”

Dierdre Keyes, of the Battered Women’s Legal Advocacy Project, said the bill, which would do away with Minnesota’s vouching system, would have a profound impact on women who have been victims of domestic violence.

“Women who stay at our shelters are required to make no contact with their former residence and it is not likely that they will want to be anywhere near their old polling place for fear of being seen,” she said. “These women are able to vote because of the vouching system. The staff of the shelter goes with the women to the shelter’s precinct and vouches for them as a resident of the shelter.”

She added, “They are interested in voting, yet on election day they were residents of the battered women’s shelter with ID’s stating the address of the of the residence they just fled. With the current vouching system in place we are able to assist them to vote and be safe.”

If the bill becomes law, “these women would choose safety over voting and their voice would not be heard at the polling place,” she said.

Several students recounted their experiences voting and how the law change might affect them.

Matt Butler, co-chair of the Macalester College chapter of MPIRG, said the bill would put a “burden on college students’ ability to vote,” and Peter Randall, a University of Minnesota student and also a member of MPIRG, said that he’s changed his residency five times in the last three years.

“There’s no need for more barriers to Minnesota’s nation leading youth vote turnout,” Randall said.

St. Paul City Councilmember Melvin Carter represented the City Council and Mayor Chris Coleman at the hearing and recounted how he was turned away from the polls in Florida during the 2000 election.

“I’m here today because I am confused by these efforts. We heard testimony today that you need a photo ID to buy alcohol or take the ACT or write a check at CVS as though those things are anywhere in comparison to the fundamental right to vote,” he said. “We should always agree that every eligible American should be welcomed at the polls.”

Justin Page, an attorney with the Minnesota Disability Law Center, said the bill would create unnecessary barriers for people with disabilities.

“An individual is entitled to have personal assistance by someone of his or her own choosing,” he said, regarding a provision in the bill that bans health care workers from assisting disabled voters. “That is what federal law requires.”

He said he has been assured by the bill’s authors that the language is going to be changed.

The bill would also prohibit people under guardianship from voting, he said. “It’s hard for me to believe that you can talk about the civic duty to vote while at the same time disenfranchising a whole group of people.”

An extension of the hearing will be held on Tuesday.

Rep. Michele Bachmann had her name removed from a public voting record under a law intended to protect people’s safety, especially victims of sexual assault and domestic violence. According to the St. Cloud Times, Bachmann is the only member of Minnesota’s congressional delegation to have her name pulled from the state’s list of registered voters. But while Bachmann’s office says she removed her name for “privacy” reasons, that’s not the intent of the law.

“I don’t think we can speak to the other members of Congress,” Bachmann spokesman Sergio Gor told the paper. “For her, it was just a privacy issue.”

The Times notes that the law was intended to protect those whose personal safety is threatened. Gor told the Times that Bachmann’s safety had not been threatened when she made the request.

There were two laws passed in 2005 that dealt with removing information from the voter list.

Before 2005, to have one’s name removed from the list of required a court order, but legislators passed a law that year that made exceptions for the “safety of the voter or the voter’s family.”

According to the law, “Upon receipt of a statement signed by the voter that withholding the voter’s name from the public information list is required for the safety of the voter or the voter’s family, the secretary of state and county auditor must withhold from the public information list the name of any a registered voter.”

A similar law was also passed in 2006 regarding removal of addresses from the voting record.

The legislature finds that individuals attempting to escape from actual or threatened domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking frequently establish new addresses in order to prevent their assailants or probable assailants from finding them. The purpose of this chapter is to enable state and local agencies to respond to requests for data without disclosing the location of a victim of domestic violence, sexual assault, or stalking;

Bachmann voted for both pieces of legislation.

On Wednesday, Pawlenty vetoed (pdf) a bill that would have required that the state notify felons when their civil rights restored upon completion of their sentences — including providing voter-registration applications. He wrote:

[C]itizens should bear some responsibility for being informed about their situations and rights.

Last night, Pawlenty vetoed (pdf) a “motor-voter” bill that would have automatically registered eligible Minnesota residents as voters when they apply for licenses or permits to drive, or another state ID card. He wrote:

[R]egistering to vote should be a voluntary, intentional act.

Also this morning: ACORN filed a lawsuit in New Mexico alleging that GOP officials there are engaged in a voter-intimidation campaign.

John McCain’s attempt to magnify allegations of voter registration fraud could mitigate the impact of a Barack Obama victory and deter black Democrats from turning out to vote in future elections.

Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.) and his allies have seized on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, ACORN, which has worked to register more than 100,000 lower-income and minority voters. Some of the registrations have been faked and investigations are underway in some key states.

Even though Republicans have leveled the same attack against Democrats in recent election cycles, accusing Sen. Obama (D-Ill.) of stealing the election could preemptively undermine the legitimacy of his presidency.

It’s part of the Republican DNA to accuse Democrats of stealing elections just as Democrats accuse Republicans of intimidating minorities. It has been ingrained in the GOP’s neurons since John F. Kennedy eclipsed Richard Nixon in 1960 when there were allegations of cheating in Illinois and Texas.

“Republicans tend to believe that Democrats tend to cheat. The belief is nothing new,” John Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College, said.

But the allegations are more ferocious because the Obama campaign has registered millions of new voters. In Minnesota, ACORN claims to have registered 42,581 voters, which could give Obama a one or two point edge in a close race.

While Obama’s voter registration effort is a part of his presidential campaign and entirely separate from ACORN’s, the McCain campaign and its surrogates have continued to falsely link Obama to ACORN.

“The reason that it is [more intense] is because Obama is black, that’s the difference,” former Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Calif.), said, adding that the attacks have longer-term implications. “This is a good way of raising the race card without raising it.”

“If [Obama] loses, two things happen. [Republicans] still have the race issue and then the black community becomes turned off” to electoral politics, Coelho said.

“I think they are doing that to build a case against Obama if the left tries to steal this election, which clearly they are trying to do,” John Feehery, a Republican strategist, said in an email.

McCain has created a campaign committee to examine allegations of voter registration fraud. On Monday, GOP volunteers handed out flyers at a McCain rally in Virginia urging reporters to link ACORN to the $700 million rescue package (something that McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis also said last week).

McCain has continued the line of attack even after being reminded that he attended an ACORN rally in favor of an immigration bill he was working on in 2006.

The McCain and Obama campaigns held dueling press conferences on Tuesday to accuse the other of acting in bad faith.

“If left uncorrected, these numerous investigations and accusations of voter fraud with ACORN could produce a nightmare scenario on Election Day,” Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, said in a statement.

David Plouffe, Obama’s campaign manager, said McCain’s tactic was “a strategic and cynical ploy to sow confusion and a deliberate attempt to decrease turnout. It is a smokescreen to challenge people inappropriately. Throwing anything they can at the wall to create a diversion.”

The GOP’s outrage erupted last Friday when the McCain campaign released a web-only advertisement insinuating that Obama worked for ACORN in the early 1990s (he did not) and argued that McCain killed the initial bailout package because ACORN’s partners would have been able to apply for government money to invest in low income housing. In fact, House Republicans objected to such a provision and it was dropped before McCain took a position on the bill.

Top GOP lawmakers also believe that Democrats are trying to steal the election. Rep. Tom Davis (R-Va.) told reporters on Friday that a Democratic lawmaker – who he would not name – told him jokingly that, “We got the votes, we’re just looking for the bodies.”

“We could lose, I suppose, if they cheat us out of it. I think the only way we lose a state like North Carolina or Indiana is to get cheated out of it,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette last week.

And there are multiple ongoing investigations into voter registration fraud in several swing states.

ACORN, not surprisingly, has a different take on the situation. “Not only is this a preemptive strike to try to attack Obama, it’s a strategy to try to justify challenging the basis of the election,” Brian Kettenring, an ACORN spokesman, said in a phone interview.

Moreover, there is no evidence that a falsely registered voter have cast actual ballots. To Democrats and independent analysts, the entire story is contrived.

“In almost every case where you’ve heard about fraud by Acorn, it’s because Acorn itself notified officials about the fraud that’s been perpetrated on them by rogue canvassers,” Brad Friedman, the author of the blog, BradBlog.com, which reports on voting rights issues, wrote recently in The Guardian. “None of this is about voter fraud. None of it. Where any fraud has occurred, it’s voter registration fraud and has resulted in exactly zero fraudulent votes.”

Robert Bauer, Obama’s election law attorney, said on Tuesday that Republicans had put “enormous amounts of pressure on criminal justice system” to ferret out voter fraud and reminded reporters that the U.S. attorneys firing scandal started because some U.S. attorneys did not prosecute voter registration fraud to the Bush administration’s liking.

“The only fraud that has affected the governmental process is the one that has been launched on the other side looking to establish a fact that does not exist,” Bauer said.
Despite the torrent of accusations, Democrats remain confident that the accusations will disappear by the wayside if Obama wins.

“Post election, all of this will be swept away,” Bob Shrum, a longtime Democratic strategist and speechwriter, said. “Having gone through 2000, where Republicans did steal the election, everybody moves on.”

“Obama is on his way to such a huge electoral win, at least as things look today, that this will not work after the election,” Joe Trippi, a Democratic political strategist, said. “And there will not be fraudulent voting that is provable in any case.”

Beyond the political calculus of winning or losing, the next president will confront larger and more complex issues.

“Obama will have much bigger problems than that—because he’s a liberal Democrat, because he’s black, and because he faces challenges far more vexing than those that confronted most of his predecessors,” G. Calvin Mackenzie, a political scientist at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, said.

Others argued it was unlikely that the McCain campaign, like most campaigns, is incapable of thinking so far ahead.

“That notion assumes way too much long-term thinking on the part of McCain and the Republicans. Their time horizon goes no farther than Election Day,” Pitney said.

Unless McCain – assuming he comes up short on Election Day – raises questions or contests the vote, the issue likely will disappear. Even in previous elections where there was no clear winner, the loser has often helped establish the winner’s legitimacy.

“That Al Gore did not cry foul about the way the election was decided probably contributed to Bush’s legitimacy,” Mackenzie said, “in the same way that Nixon’s refusal to cry foul in 1960 when there was genuine cheating in Illinois and Texas helped Kennedy.”

Jonathan E. Kaplan is the Center for Independent Media’s Washington correspondent.

“After the disastrous administration of the past eight years,” Springsteen told the crowd in the course of a five-minute introductory speech, “what we really need is someone to lead us in an American reclamation project.” Here’s that speech, followed by an acoustic performance of “The Rising.”

Bruce Springsteen: “An American Reclamation Project” Philadelphia, 10/4/08 (9:15)

Kiffmeyer was an extremely controversial figure as secretary of state, drawing criticism from Democrats, independents and, occasionally, Republicans.

Kiffmeyer came under fire for her statements regarding the separation of church and state. At a National Day of Prayer event in 2004, Kiffmeyer said that the “five words” that are “probably most destructive” in America today are “separation of church and state.” Kiffmeyer later told the Star Tribune’s Nick Coleman, “It’s not the words that are destructive, it’s the way they are interpreted. There are a lot of good church people who don’t think they can be involved in government.” She also told the Minnesota Monitor that her statements regarding the separation of church and state were “cobbled together.”

Despite the fact that Minnesota’s same-day voter registration policy has helped the state maintain the highest voter turnout in the nation for five decades, she often told other officials from other states attempting to implement same-day voter registration that it was problematic and contributed to voter fraud. She told John Fund, author of “Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy,” that she was “tired of hearing her state’s same-day registration extolled.” At the same time, she often took credit for the high voter turnout.

Many of her decisions as secretary of state were overturned by the courts. In 2002, when Sen. Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash, she prevented the distribution of replacement absentee ballots to those who requested them, a decision overruled by the Minnesota Supreme Court.

In 2004, she attempted to remove the Independence Party from the ballot, a move that was overruled by the Minnesota Supreme Court. She tried to prevent the use of IDs issued by tribal governments for voter registration, a move that was overruled by the courts.

During the 2004 elections, Kiffmeyer made national headlines when she decided to post terrorist warning signs at polling places throughout Minnesota urging voters to be wary of people appearing at precincts with “shaved head[s] or short hair” who “smell of unusual herbal/flower water or perfume,” wear baggy clothing or appear to be whispering to themselves.

Race to the Right, a conservative talk show that appeared on several conservative radio stations around the Twin Cities and St. Cloud, grew very critical of Kiffmeyer after she agreed to go on the air five times, but canceled one appearance and failed to show for three others without notice.

The show’s hosts wanted to discuss the fact that the secretary of state’s Web site carried only metro-area elections results in 2005, an odd-year election. Kiffmeyer briefly touched on the issue in an interview with Minnesota Monitor’s Paul Schmelzer. Of working with the county auditors, she complained: “I did stuff and went to things and found that it is ever-unending. I can’t seem to get ahead … You meet this and it’s more. You meet this, and it’s more. It’s unending.”

The Kiffmeyer clan made waves on the political scene even before Mary Kiffmeyer’s tenure as secretary of state. Her husband, Ralph Kiffmeyer, served one term in the Minnesota House, and he made it a controversial one with a bill to outlaw “sex toys and live sex performances.”

Kiffmeyer and her husband are evangelical Christians, and are part owners in a “Christ-centered” bank. In fact, Kiffmeyer was the director of the bank’s parent holding company. Two paintings at Riverview Community Bank in Otsego hang on the wall of the office where the bank president prays with bank customers. One painting shows “two businessmen in an office; one is shaking hands with Christ, as though closing a deal,” and the other “is a scene of what appears to be Eden. Tucked into the background of that painting is a small representation of Riverview,” according to the Pioneer Press in 2004.

Continued: Click “Read More”On to Minnesota Majority

Since Kiffmeyer was voted out of office in 2006, she has joined up with an organization called Minnesota Majority as its executive director. Minnesota Majority is made up of Jeff Davis, founder of Minnesota Citizens in Defense of Marriage, a group dedicated to preventing legal rights for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Minnesotans, and Drew Emmer, uncle of Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Delano.

Minnesota Majority is an advocacy group that engages in a hodgepodge of wedge issue and culture war rhetoric. Its Web site decries taxes, abortion, GLBT rights, embryonic stem cell research and illegal immigration. It advocates for military intervention in Iraq, abstinence-only sex ed, a free market health care fix and intelligent design taught in the classrooms. There’s barely a religious right or ultra-conservative topic left untouched.

The group came under criticism for racially charged text on its blog earlier this year. “It is not surprising that Sweden has a lower infant mortality rate, or that Japan has a longer life expectancy than the United States does,” read an article on the site. “They are nearly racially pure; we are not.” Kiffmeyer defended the text saying that its mention of racial purity must be understood in context, that it “is simply descriptive.”

“That’s a genetic term,” Kiffmeyer told the Pioneer Press’ Rachel Stassen-Berger. “It does matter when you are doing medical studies.”

The group’s newest project, globalclimatescam.com, is dedicated to “exposing the truth about global warming hysteria” by pointing out that the planet can’t be warming because we had a cold winter this year.

United States voter turnout has been lower than 55 percent since 1972. During that same time frame, Minnesota’s average voter turnout has been more than 70 percent. Same-day registration was enacted in 1976 in  Minnesota.

Research by Eric Ostermeier and Larry Jacobs of the University of Minnesota Humphrey Institute’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance demonstrated that voters who registered at the polls accounted for 15 to 21 percent of Minnesota voters in federal elections — or about the same margin by which Minnesota leads the nation in voter turnout (PDF).

Current federal law does not require identification for voting. Those standards are left up to the states. If the Election Day Registration Act were to pass, it would create a voter registration system that is very similar to Minnesota’s.

“For over 33 years, Minnesota’s same day registration law has helped produce the highest voter turnout of any state,” said Klobuchar in a press statement last week. “Same day registration works, it encourages people to be engaged and interested in the issues facing our country – this bill gives a voice to every American who wants to vote.”

For now, the bill is backed exclusively by Democrats, including Minnesota Reps. Tim Walz, Betty McCollum and Jim Oberstar. A divide between Democrats and Republicans has developed, with the former looking to… 

Continued: Click “Read More”make voting as easy as possible and the latter looking to reduce voter fraud through stricter identification standards.

David Schultz, a senior fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Institute for Law and Politics, recently released a paper looking at  the rhetoric surrounding voter identification and voter fraud. “Less Than Fundamental: The Myth of Voter Fraud and the Coming of the Second Great Disenfranchisement (PDF),” looks at how recent actions to tighten voter registration requirements, as a deterrent to voter fraud, are disenfranchising certain voters — in much the same way the rhetoric of voter fraud was used as a reason to disenfranchise Americans 100 years ago.

“A second great disenfranchisement is afoot across the United States as, yet again, voter fraud is raised as a way to intimidate immigrants, people of color, the poor, and the powerless, and prevent them from voting,” wrote Schultz. 

The bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform looked into voter fraud and found 52 convictions for voter fraud by the Department of Justice since 2002. The New York Times recently looked deeper into those convictions and found that a significant majority were immigrants and felons who were confused about their voting status. In fact, one felon showed poll workers his prison-issued identification in an attempt to vote.

Schultz wrote, “[A]ssume the fifty-two convictions by the Department of Justice are accurate instances of fraud. This means that fifty-two out of 196,139,871 ballots cast in federal elections, or .00003% of the votes were fraudulent. While critics might assert that these cases represent only the tip of the iceberg, it is important to underscore that prosecutions occurred on the heels of the Justice Department taking an aggressive stance on this crime. There is a greater chance of one being hit by lightning than of an election being affected by fraud.”

And as Ellison told Minnesota Public Radio recently, Minnesota’s open voting process has not encouraged fraud, and instead has energized Minnesotans to become politically active. He said: “In Minnesota, we’ve been doing this for many, many years. It’s been going really well. We have the highest voter turn out in the country. We have almost no fraud. I’ve never heard of a proven case. And we have a very active and civically engaged community because people can participate.”