And that's why I vote in person

[dreamshark]

Minnesota appears to be a blue state from a distance, but (as it pretty much always is) the Minnesota State Legislature is as purple as it is possible to be. This year was even closer than usual - with the Minnesota House balanced on a 67/67 knife edge as they recounted the votes in Shakopee. But wait! Turns out one of the clear DFL winners in a different district DID NOT LIVE IN THE DISTRICT HE WAS RUNNING FOR and was disqualified.  So now they have to have a special election for that district. (Can they make that cheater pay for it? He wasn't even subtle about the pretense - rented an apartment but didn't even pretend to occupy it. Congratulations, Bozo, you singlehandedly knee-capped your party). Any Democrat could have won in that district, so after they redo the election the DFL should have the majority. But in the meantime... chaos!

Because now we get to the really fun part: that recount in Shakopee. The Democrat won by FOURTEEN VOTES!  Yes, Virginia, sometimes your individual vote DOES count. But wait, it gets better!  During the recount it was discovered that 20 mail-in ballots had gone missing! No sign of election fraud here, just an oopsie. Looks like somebody accidentally threw them away sometime after the envelopes were counted and the voter names recorded but before the votes were opened and added to the tally. But wait! Because of all the steps you have to go through to validate mail-in votes, they have the voter names and addresses. So they contacted all the voters and had them come in and testify as to who they voted for, proving that counting those 20 votes would not have changed the outcome of the election. This did not satisfy the GOP for some reason, so they are still wrangling over it, but I think a judge has now ruled that the election results stand.

If you've lost track at this point, it is clear that when the dust settles the DFL will have a majority, so by rights the Speaker of the House should be a Democrat. But the House was supposed to convene ... yesterday? and elect a Speaker, and at this precise moment the GOP has the majority. They think that gives them the right to not only elect their own Speaker but to retain the Speakership for the rest of the term even once the new Democrats show up (not sure why - guess it's in the fine print). But only if they have a quorum to convene, and they don't. Because all the Democrats decided to stay home until next week when they should have a majority again. 

But... the GOP , happy to invoke the letter of the law when it means they get to control the Speakership on a technicality, decided they don't need to follow that rule about having a quorum and tried to convene anyway. Turns out that when this kind of thing happens the parliamentarian who gets to decide how the rules work is.... the Secretary of State. Who happens to be a Democrat. So the GOP members voted to BAR HIM FROM ENTERING THE CHAMBER!  WTF?? I assume they just made that rule up. 

This kind of thing is why I really really think that voting by mail when you don't have to is a bad idea. Not because the procedure is rife with fraud, but just because it has so many steps and each step presents the opportunity for mistakes. Usually it doesn't really matter if a few votes get lost. If this election hadn't been so insanely close nobody would ever have noticed that these votes WERE lost. But every now and then it matters A LOT. In this case it mattered so much that nobody is ever going to believe 10 years from now that this happened because it is such a ridiculous confluence of coincidences and bad sportsmanship. And even a little fraud - not in the voting process itself but that guy who was transparently pretending to live someplace where he really didn't. 

Comments

[redbird]

In the last couple of years, I've gotten absentee ballots for most elections, but I then voted in person for the most recent election, because I could do it at a large, airy, library, on a convenient day. The registrar looked, saw that they'd sent me an absentee ballot, and asked me to promise I'd shred it when it arrived, which I did.

[dreamshark]

A system that relies on somebody "promising to shred the old one" doesn't give me a whole lot of confidence. I hope that if you had used the absentee ballot after already voting that it would have been discarded. And that you wouldn't have later been accused of attempted election fraud. Which is probably what would have happened if you lived in Florida.

[redbird]

They check whether someone has voted in person before opening and counting their absentee ballot. At least in Massachusetts, absentee ballots go in nested envelopes: an anonymous outer envelope, containing another envelope labeled with the voter's name and address. So, they open the outer envelope, and check whether the ballot is from someone who voted in person before opening the inner envelope.

That's useful not only against attempted fraud, but simple absent-mindedness: if I don't remember whether I received and returned an absentee ballot, I can vote in person. If they'd already received and checked in my absentee ballot, the in-person location would have turned me away.

[dreamshark]

Minnesota uses the same nested ballot procedure. Which amuses me because when I was teaching classes in TCP/IP I used a similar system of envelopes inside envelopes to explain the concept of "header encapsulation."

[mplsfish]

Thank you for the concise explanation of the shenanigans. I have caught little bits of whats going on (democrat boycott) without enough context to understand why.
I have found that actually following the news closely is very bad for my mental health and makes it impossible to understand what is important. One of the things facepook has been good for is bringing the important things to my attention.