By Mark Fischenich
MANKATO — After the 2008-09 Minnesota Senate election and recount, it wasn’t surprising that some venting occurred Monday when a group of election officials gathered in Mankato.
There was the eye-blurring recount of nearly 3 million ballots and the sometimes endless challenging of local election officials’ rulings on who the voter was supporting.
“It was just plain getting to be silly,” Nicollet County Auditor Bridgette Kennedy said of the often-frivolous challenges.
Then there’s the lawsuit phase of the recount, which began Monday, in which local election judges are facing possible subpoenas to testify. St. Peter City Clerk Barb Luker said she’s had two judges say they’re never going to serve again.
“This particular moment in the recount — with the harassment of election judges taking place — hurts us all,” said Secretary of State Mark Ritchie. “... This part is not OK.”
But Ritchie asked the local elections officials from Blue Earth and Nicollet County to try to be understanding of the behavior of representatives of Al Franken and Norm Coleman, who’ve been separated by little more 200 votes throughout the process.
When it’s that close, candidates tend to get a bit intense about every single step of the process, Ritchie said.
“The candidates are going to be lunatics and the system allows them to be lunatics,” he said.
“But why does the system allow them to be lunatics?” North Mankato City Clerk Nancy Gehrke asked.
“The goal is for the loser to feel he lost,” Ritchie said — as opposed to the candidate believing the recount hadn’t been as thorough as necessary.
Along with the venting, though, Ritchie and area election officials ranging from township clerks to county auditors talked about ways of making future elections — and recounts — work better.
“It may be 40 years again before we have this,” Ritchie said of the extremely tight margin in a statewide race. “... It could be next year.”
It was 46 years ago that Minnesota had something similar — an extremely close race for governor that resulted in a 139-day recount. Changes in election law were the result and should be again, according to Ritchie.
“In ’62 they learned a tremendous amount and adjusted the system with what they learned,” he said, asking for suggestions and ideas.
Kennedy suggested the Legislature adopt an early voting system that’s longer, less cumbersome and open to anybody — not just people who say they will be unable to get to the polls on Election Day. That’s what people who vote absentee must do now.
“I like that our citizens don’t have to come up with a lie to be able to do it,” Kennedy said of the proposed change.
Ritchie said other proposals include an earlier primary election, possibly June or August. One reason for that is a recount like the current one, if it came out of a primary election in September, wouldn’t be completed in time for the general election.
The standard for an automatic recount might also be raised from the current one — one-half of 1 percent. The margin in the Franken-Coleman race is less than one-hundredth of 1 percent.
A first-term Democrat, Ritchie is holding similar meetings with local election officials around the state. And he gave the south-central Minnesota group reasons for feeling good about the job they did and the integrity of the state’s ballot system.
He noted that the Franken and Coleman campaigns had representatives looking at every one of the 2.9 million ballots during the recount, and they agreed with the local election officials 99.7 percent of the time about who the ballot was cast for.
Of the remaining ballots, the State Canvassing Board agreed unanimously 95 percent of the time.
“Which means there were 50 ballots of contention in the state,” Ritchie said.
Coleman’s lawsuit is attempting to add several thousand more to the list — absentee ballots that were rejected. The suit also alleges that some damaged ballots were duplicated so they could be read by vote-counting machines on Election Day but were not properly marked as duplicates — causing those ballots to be counted twice in the recount.
Franken leads the race by 225 votes.
