Reading Primary election privacy concerns, a column by Senator Gary Dahms, R-Redwood Falls, published in the Montevideo American-News, left us wondering if our memory of party control of the Minnesota Legislature during the 89th Session (2015-2016) was faulty.
Dahms writes:
In 2016, the DFL-led legislature decided to switch from the party caucus system because of record turnout. Of course, the number of people participating was encouraging, but it resulted in a multitude of complaints about the unwieldiness of the system and the unpleasantly long wait times to participate in basic democracy.
This is puzzling information to us, given that Representative Kurt Daudt, R-Crown, was the Speaker of the Minnesota House in 2016, according to the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library.
The Senate was led by Thom Bakk, DFL-Cook, to be sure, and SF2985, the Senate presidential primary bill, was introduced first in the upper, DFL-controlled chamber first, on February 21, 2016. However, the bill's five authors and coauthors were a bi-partisan crew, including then Senate Minority Leader David Hann, R-Eden Prairie, and Assistant Minority Leader Warren Limmer, R-Maple Grove.
The chief author of HF3549, the companion bill in the Republican-controlled House introduced two days later, was Tim Sanders, R-Blaine. The other authors were DFLers.
Dahms voted against the Senate version of the bill, but later changed his vote for the bill as amended by the House.
Yes, once upon a time in Minnesota before the current divided session, the Minnesota legislature was divided. Who knew? Apparently not Senator Dahms.
Dahms goes on to say in his column published by the Montevideo American News:
In 2019, Senate Republicans decided to tighten the laws and passed legislation to make the collected data less public. Any breach of confidentiality is illegal. The DFL-led House of Representatives passed the bill, and Gov. Tim Walz signed it into law.
That's a somewhat different account than that told in Voter data from Minnesota’s 2020 presidential primary will be given to the state’s major political parties — and only the political parties by Peter Callaghan:
Ballots cast in the state’s 2020 presidential nominating primary, on March 3 of that year, will be secret. But in order to cast a vote, primary voters will have to request a Republican or Democratic ballot. And now, under a section of the state government finance and policy bill signed by Gov. Tim Walz last month, the Republican Party of Minnesota, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party — and perhaps even the new marijuana legalization parties — will get a list of every voter’s party choice.
. . .A law creating the new primary passed in 2016, after a particularly chaotic-if-well-attended batch of caucuses took place that winter. As part of a deal worked out with state elections officials, legislators and party officials, the primary will be used by both parties to decide delegates for their national nominating conventions.
At the time, little attention was paid to the issue of whether voter lists would be public. Lists of people who vote in other elections is public data, but those lists don’t contain any information about a voter’s political party preference.
When it became clear that the 2016 law would let anyone get the party preference data, however, Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon began pushing for a change. He originally preferred that nobody get party preference data, but the parties insisted on getting it as a condition of shifting to primaries. In fact, their national party rules required it, the party leaders said.
So during this year’s legislative session, Simon requested a change that was accepted by the DFL-controlled House: that the DFL get only a list of Democratic voters and the GOP get only a list of GOP voters. Limiting access to the parties was what Simon termed “the next-best place to be.”
He didn’t get that either, though. State GOP Chair Jennifer Carnahan complained when the session began that Simon and the state DFL was trying to block her from getting lists of both GOP and DFL voters. That was true, but the bill language as passed and signed is closer to what Republican Party preferred — it stipulates that all parties will get every party’s list.
“All political parties will get all the data,” Senate State Government and Elections Committee Chair Mary Kiffmeyer, R-Big Lake, said after the bill was agreed to by House and Senate negotiators in late May. “This is a political party issue so we accommodated everyone to the best of our ability. The purpose of a nomination primary is for political parties to narrow their choices. It’s a party process. Do Lutherans vote in the Catholic election for Pope? No.”
Read the rest at MinnPost.
Session Daily's Mike Cook reported in Tensions high as state government compromise, pensions plan heard, notes that the change in the presidential primary law was negotiated prior to the special session on May 25, 2019:
. . . Another election change aims to keep voter data private.
Current statute requires a county auditor to make publicly available a list that includes the party choice of anyone who voted in the most recent presidential nomination primary. The compromise would make such voter data private; however, a list of voters corresponding to each party would be provided to each major political party. . . .
Rep. Michael Nelson (DFL-Brooklyn Park), the division chair, was frustrated with the process as well, but also the lack of Senate Republican conference committee participation. He, too, believes the legislative culture needs to change.
“(They) chose to drag those all out and not come to decisions at the end of conference committee,” Nelson said. “… We can sit here and proselytize and we can scream and argue at each other, but, members, we are here to get a job done.”
Other than that, Dahms seems fair to blame everything related the presidential primary date privacy problems on the DFL's control of the legislature in 2016.
We're reminded of a recent post about another West Central Minnesota Republican Senator: Sen. Andrew Lang seems behind the curve on current funding & progress of CWD test research.
Related posts:
- MN Senator Gary Dahms shares scary vision of pot-loving DFL majority with Brown Co faithful
- Hagedorn: Senator Gary Dahms stands between you and socialist legal recreational marijuana
- The thirty percent solution: Senator Gary Dahms thinks union organizing drives are totally easy
- Buzz Kill? Minnesota Senate ag committee eradicates pollinator protections from state law
- When GOP catchphrases go wrong: Dahms, nursing homes and "one size fits all"
- There's a fundraiser for 2 rural Republicans right now at some Twin Cities lobbyists' property
Photo: State senator Gary Dahms, Via a 2019 newsletter to his constituents.
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