Dear Neighbor,
Greetings from St. Paul, where this week House Democrats started bringing omnibus finance bills to the floor for preliminary votes of the full body. There are a dozen or so of these packages that fund various sections of our state government for the next two years.
The high-level concern is these budget bills, collectively, would increase state spending by an unsustainable 40 percent (from $51.6 billion to around $72 billion), while also wiping out the $17.5 billion surplus and failing to deliver meaningful tax relief.
The first omnibus finance bills to come to the floor were among the “smaller” we’ll see this session, pertaining to higher education and the Legacy Amendment. We’ll get back to budget notes next time but, for today, I would like to focus on another bill House Democrats approved this week that is not a budget bill:
Elections bill (H.F. 3)
Let’s not mince words here: On Thursday night, House Democrats approved the most partisan election bill in state history, violating Minnesota’s longstanding tradition of requiring bipartisan support for election law changes. This bill will regulate campaign speech, limit engagement in the political process, and threaten election integrity with automatic voter registration when you sign up for a driver’s license.
My biggest concern is with same-day voter registration provision in the bill. I recently spoke with a county elections specialist about this issue. The specialist voiced concern that if someone wanted to commit voter fraud, they could easily do it through the same-day voter registration vouching statute.
This bill does nothing to address the fact that someone can fraudulently register to vote on voting day, vote, then have their vote count in the election. It could take weeks to detect the fraud after the fact that the vote is already banked – if it gets detected at all.
During 2016, there were up to 16,000 such persons who could not be found by the Social Security Administration when their voter registration information was sent by state election of?cials.
In March 2018, there was a report from the Office of the Legislative Auditor that revealed more than 26,000 individuals whose status was marked “challenged” (because they failed one or more eligibility tests) who voted in November 2016. Following that same election, Ramsey County alone tried to, but could not con?rm the validity of the addresses of approximately 6,000 voters. That is a staggering number.
I spoke with a resident who said she went to vote in the 2020 election and election workers told her she had already voted absentee when in fact she had not. There was also a canvass done recently in Crow Wing County by a local group of citizens. They canvassed roughly 400 residents. They found a 5% discrepancy rate in the voter roll, including a woman reporting she didn't even vote in the 2020 election, but the voter roll showed that she did indeed vote.
I can also tell you I have used the Secretary of State’s list to reach out to people in our district. I came across addresses that didn’t even have a home or residence at the listed address. So, in other words, people were registering to vote where there was no residence at all. That wreaks of fraud. One address I came across was a patch of woods that had a deer stand on it – and no home.
I personally addressed my concerns in the House Elections Committee about how a person will be able to vote numerous times without being caught (and possibly using numerous aliases to do it):
- in person early voting
- mail in ballot
- absentee ballot
- election-day voting
Not one single House Democrat who disagreed with me – nor the Secretary of State’s office – were willing to address my concerns. They wanted me to just move on and only argued with the regurgitated talking points of “disinformation” or “misinformation” in response to mine and other members concerns.
I will keep fighting for what I believe is right because Minnesotans deserve a system where voting is easy but cheating is hard.
Sincerely,
Ben