Teflon Dan Severson continues to wander around Minnesota saying outrageous things that the media doesn't boether to factcheck. Perhaps self-declared prophet Cindy Jacob's intercession in 2009 has finally taken hold or perhaps Minnesota's press lack the motivation or the resources to evaluate his claims.
The New Ulm Journal's Fritz Busch reports in GOP candidates attend event in Sleepy Eye:
"The secretary of state should serve the people, not a political party or entangled in legal issues as it has been several times," Severson said. "I want to bring this office back to its status as a national model as it was when Mary Kiffmeyer was in office.
We've seen and heard this nostalgic glance back to Mary Kiffmeyer's tenure as Secretary of State, which ended in January 2007, and think that it's time to review her record.
Severson is implying that the Kiffmeyer administration at the Office of the Secretary of State (OSS) was unblemished by legal wranglings or partisan interests. Is this claim true?
Kiffmeyer fought the law and the law won
We believe the notion that the Kiffmeyer-era OSS was never inolved in legal proceedings is enough to make a cat laugh.
In an interview with campaign finance and electoral law attorney Christian Sande, The Uptake's Allison Herrera reported on November 4, 2012 in MN Voter Restriction Author Has History Of Voter Suppression (links added by Bluestem Prairie}:
Former Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer was sued four times from 2000 to 2006 on the eve of an election.
In 2002, she was sued for refusing to send voters new absentee ballots after Senator Paul Wellstone was killed in a plane crash less than two weeks before the election. Former Vice President Walter Mondale’s name replaced Wellstone’s on the ballot. The Minnesota Supreme Court ordered Kiffmeyer to mail the revised replacement ballots (see pages 736-738 here).
In 2004, Kiffmeyer was also ordered by the Minnesota Supreme Court to place Independence Party candidates on the ballot in Candidacy of Independence Party Candidates vs. Kiffmeyer.
Also in 2004, the ACLU and the National Congress of American Indians were among groups that sued Kiffmeyer to compel her to accept tribal IDs as proof of residency and identity when registering to vote on election day. Kiffmeyer argued that Minnesota law prohibited tribal ID cards when the holder did not reside on the reservation. The plaintiffs in this case cited the Help America Vote Act, which allows individuals to present a, “government document that shows the name and address of the voter”.
In 2006, Sande says he helped American Indian tribes again when Kiffmeyer sought to disallow tribal IDs for a second time. This time, she cited a law passed by the Minnesota Legislature that outlined which IDs would be accepted when registering to vote – instead of what was listed in the Help America Vote Act. Kiffmeyer said she would not deviate from Minnesota’s law. Sande says Chief Judge James M. Rosenbaum issued a temporary restraining order and signed onto a consent decree ordering her to accept tribal IDs.
Sande said students were also turned away in the 2006 election when they tried to use their utility bills to register on election day. The Hennepin County Court ordered the polls open an extra hour to try to get students to come back who’d been turned away.
That's the legal wranglings--but there's more. The partisan part.
The Partisan
Some of Kiffmeyer's partisanship came in the form of actions to suppress or frighten voters (often those likely to vote Democratic, while other actions were purely partisan.
In 2004, the City Pages reported in Mary's Election Posse:
. . . Minnesota's Republican secretary of state, Mary Kiffmeyer, convened a training session for an apparently Republican-dominated group of volunteer election observers recruited to visit polling places as representatives of the secretary's office. The gathering drew criticism from Democrats and progressive get-out-the-vote groups for a variety of reasons.
First, as far as anyone could tell, no previous Minnesota secretary of state had ever recruited and deputized citizen observers in this manner. "We never recruited people to do poll-observing in Minnesota," says former DFL Secretary of State Joan Growe, "and I've never heard of it.
"The secretary of state has, under the law, the authority to let people go to the polls as representatives of the office," Growe continues. "But while I was serving, I didn't ever see a circumstance under which I needed to have partisan people--or independent people, if they are--go in and observe what the election administrators were doing. I have observed elections in many foreign countries as a polling observer, but I've never thought it necessary to authorize people from the secretary of state's office to observe elections in Minnesota." (Bert Black, the SoS's legal counsel, said last Friday that "I don't know" whether such observers had been used in Minnesota in the past.)
G.R. Anderson had more coverage of a Kiffmeyer-style election in Election Day's Checkpoint Charlies.
And earlier, the alt-weekly paper reported in Kiffmeyer Watch: Party Girl:
The love-fest continues between an ever-growing army of critics and the secretary of state. Two weeks ago, Mike Opat wrote an opinion piece in the Star Tribune that laid out the dubious achievements of Mary Kiffmeyer. The Hennepin County commissioner nicely summarized the complaints against Kiffmeyer that have become fairly routine in the last two months. He criticized her for rushing to implement a new voter-registration system under guidelines set by the Help America Vote Act (HAVA). And he questioned her for sending out a weird terrorism-alert poster (beware of men wearing perfume and muttering to themselves) that many said would scare people away from the polls.
But Opat's scathing piece--the DFLer called her "the least competent person" ever to hold the office in Minnesota--contained a new and troubling set of charges. One of Kiffmeyer's less-publicized battles, as Opat described it, has been with the election offices in Hennepin and Ramsey counties.
. . .And, indeed, the dispute has left some observers alleging that Kiffmeyer hoped to suppress the vote in these Democratic bastions. Although some of the criticism emanates from her DFL adversaries, Kiffmeyer's actions have provided ample fuel for the controversy.
But even Republican Hennepin County commissioner wondered what she was doing, the paper reported:
Ultimately, the spat has transcended mere partisan sniping between state and local officials. Randy Johnson, an old-school Republican who chairs the Hennepin County Board, was left miffed, as well. "It's still not clear to us what she wanted from us," Johnson says, adding that he took offense at Kiffmeyer's assertion that Hennepin County was violating the law. "We weren't. She's the only one that thinks so."
But the discontent wasn't simply partisan In 2004, the paper reported in Some Things About Mary:
. . .The complaint is widespread, and surprisingly bipartisan. While fellow Republicans are reluctant to openly pillory Kiffmeyer, some are brutal in not-for-attribution remarks. "Nobody has ever seen anything like this. She sees black helicopters everywhere she looks and she wants to put up as many barriers to voting as she can," one lobbyist and fellow Republican says flatly. "There isn't anyone who deals with her who doesn't see problems. If this election doesn't go well, I think she's going to be in big trouble."
By American standards, Minnesota has an enviable history of clean elections with high rates of voter turnout. Kiffmeyer, however, has expressed doubts about one of the main pillars of the system, same-day voter registration. While she has not publicly advocated its abolition in Minnesota (which would amount to political heresy), she has advised other states that it increases the risk of voter fraud. While charges and convictions for voter fraud remain scarce, they are at the heart of Kiffmeyer's political mantra. As a result, she has also pushed--both successfully and unsuccessfully--for more stringent identification requirements at the polling places. . . .
For a roundup of other high points of Kiffmeyer's career as Secretary of State, we recommend Firedoglake's 2012 piece, GOP’s War on Voting, Minnesota Edition: The Twelve Ways of ALEC’s Kiffmeyer to Disenfranchise Us.
That, gentle readers, is what Teflon Dan Severson considers court-free and nonpartisan.
Voters do have other choices for filling the office vacanted by the retirement of Mark Ritchie. Steve Simon, the DFL endorsed candidate, has actually gotten bipartisan legislation passed (and we mean really bipartisan, not a stray Republican vote here or there) to improve Minnesota's election system. He wrote legislation that moved the state's primary back so that military and overseas voters have a better chance of participating.
More recently, he passed legislation that allows no-excuses absentee voting, while reducing the number of people for whom as registered voter may vouch for their residence to seven (vouching is done to prove residence, not identity).
Simon's standard for a secretary of state is Joan Growe, who introduces him in this new campaign video:
Photo: A laughing cat.
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