It took two meetings and over 5 hours of public testimony before the Senate Local Government and Elections Committee, chaired by Senator Vandeveer, passed SF1577, the Voter ID Amendment on Wednesday. The bill has been referred to the Government Innovation and Veterans Committee for the next round of debate.
Opponents of Voter ID, including Beth Fraser with the secretary of state’s office testified that the amendment will put an end to Election Day registration and absentee voting. The amendment won’t do either. It will simply change some of the procedures for Election Day registration and absentee voting to give the processes greater integrity.
The practice of vouching for otherwise unidentified voters will come to an end. All voters will be required to produce valid photo ID, or in the case of absentee voters, provide some other verifiable proof of their identity. Using last year’s vetoed statutory voter ID bill as a guide, that other proof will likely be an ID number that election officials can confirm belongs to the absentee voter.
On Wednesday, Fraser testified that under the proposed amendment, all Election Day registrants would have to cast provisional ballots. She said this would result in upwards of 500,000 provisional ballots and an inability to know election results until 10 days after an election. This is also false. Only Election Day registrants who lack valid photo ID would be required to vote with a provisional ballot. Our neighboring state of Wisconsin, which has a similar population size and election rules sees about 4,000 provisional ballots cast in a typical election. If Minnesota’s experience is similar, that’s an average of less than one provisional ballot per polling place.
Fraser also suggested that up to 2 additional election judges would be needed in each polling place to handle provisional ballots. Really? 2 additional judges to handle one provisional ballot in a 15 hour shift? There’s government efficiency for you.
Despite the hyperbole, the committee voted 8-6 to pass the bill out of committee and on to the Government Innovation and Veterans Committee, chaired by Senator Parry. A hearing date in that committee has not yet been announced.
An observer of the right-wing phenomenon must explain the paradox of followers who would escape from freedom even as they incessantly invoke the word freedom as if it were a mantra. But freedom so defined does not mean ordinary civil liberties like the prohibition of illegal government search and seizure, the right of due process, or the right not to be tortured. The hard right has never protested the de facto abrogation of much of the Bill of Rights during the last decade. In the right-wing id, freedom is the emotional release that a hostile and psychologically repressed person feels when he is finally able to lash out at the objects of his resentment. Freedom is his prerogative to rid himself of people who are different, or who unsettle him. Freedom is merging into a like-minded herd. Right-wing alchemy transforms freedom into authoritarianism.
In the not too distant past, the National Republican Lawyers Association breathlessly announced that the GWB Administration had successfully pursued several cases of “voter fraud.’ Over the course of 8 years, throughout the 50 states, with 10′s of 1000′s of elections held at the local, state and Federal levels, with 100′s of 1,000,000′s of votes cast, GWB and his cohorts at DOJ came up with 311.
311.
And in Minnesota, from just 1 election year, there have been 157 convictions for voter fraud, with another 173 cases pending. Meaning in Minnesota (when someone’s looking), we’ve had more fraud caught in one year than the whole rest of the country in 8. See a problem there?
Depends on what method of fraud, etc. Care to elaborate on that? Plus, 157 votes didn’t change anything for anyone. And are these 157 (or so) conniving rascals part of some kind of orchestrated movement? If not, there IS NO PROBLEM, except perhaps human error, etc. IF SO, once again Dan please enlighten us with THAT conspiracy theory… I/we await your reply to these very pertiment and important questions.
still waiting…
ELECTION FRAUD, not voter fraud….!!!!! Now that’s an issue worth fighting about! (But ya won’t hear about that from the Right….nooooo way!)
And Dan I hate to say this but in the case of “voter fraud” size does matter. Those numbers you are posting are miniscule. Now, maybe not so much for the mayoral race in Coatesville, or wherever….!!!! But just sayin’.