Minnesota's Office of the Secretary of State gave the Senate Elections Committee a valuable overview presentation today. Worth watching in full, but the public may be particularly interested in how Elections Director Paul Linnell addressed 5 specific problem areas from 2024. 🧵 The first problem that drew public attention was errors in the printed ballots in several parts of the state. Here's Linnell's comments on that. youtube.com/live/5B91YGmdO…

Three million Minnesotans voted. That means there are 3 million signed pieces of paper like these, stored in secure facilities in counties and cities, retained for at least 22 months. And they were all counted by humans. Those counts get combined up the canvassing process. These are three of the most common forms. On top, examples from an election-day polling place and an absentee envelope. On bottom, a certificate from a direct-balloting early voter. There are other variants too. But it's a lot of boxes of paper, whatever the form.

In Minnesota absentee voting, signatures on paper and paper ballots are kept in synch with each other and with the separate computer systems used to track voters on the one hand and votes on the other. This starts with an envelope with the voter's signature and other info. 🧵 As each envelope is accepted, that is marked on the bottom of the envelope itself with the ballot board members' initials, and it is recorded into the computer.

Monday evening, activists will try to convince the City of Crosslake, MN, to take over administration of absentee voting, currently handled by Crow Wing County. This table in the agenda packet is part of their case. Understanding how they got this wrong provides perspective. 1/9 The point the table makes is that many of the ballots cast over the past three general elections were handled by the county. Using the correct numbers shown here doesn't qualitatively change this. If you believe county handling is bad, a few percentage points won't matter. 2/9

When someone writes they've been "digging into" voter files and the very first observation they report is that they've found voters listed with birth year of 1900, you can stop right there. Anyone who is at all serious, not just dabbling in sensation, would have the explanation. As the law says, "A voter registration application accepted prior to August 1, 1983, is not deficient for lack of date of birth." Because back then, that information wasn't collected. revisor.mn.gov/statutes/cite/…

Everyone in Minneapolis ought to read and benefit from @DearDara's ode to the Camden Social. But doubly so anyone with even a passing familiarity with any of the bar-and-grills that have occupied that spot since 1933. I'll explain why downthread. mspmag.com/eat-and-drink/… You'll see that there are vast differences. And yet, you'll spot commonality in the hospitality. Here's Dara: "on my first visit, all I saw was that he was a natural connector, holding three casual conversations with customers at once, pivoting around his great big, easy smile."

Tom Emmer's statement on the certification of the 2020 presidential election is in the news again. Those unfamiliar with Minnesota may not understand the significance of his self-description as "someone who understands firsthand what it is like to face a contested election." 🧵 This refers to Emmer's run for Governor in 2010. The most important point is that he only "face[d] a contested election" in the sense that he himself contested it. There was no real question that Mark Dayton won. Emmer could simply have conceded. Instead, he fought on.

I can't reply to @refundpolicy so I'll quote tweet. In the historical core area of Minneapolis, the address numbering regions A, B, C, and D smoothly transition into each other along the arc that I've marked in red. Imagine the sample block rotating as it moves along the arc. 1/5

https://twitter.com/refundpolicy/status/1667327096790679553

These regions A–D follow a consistent pattern if one thinks in terms of upriver/downriver and riverward/landward rather than north/south/east/west. The upriver and riverward sides of the blocks have odd numbers, the dowriver and landward sides have even numbers. 2/5

I'm thinking again about Shutesbury expanding its Town Clerk's office from 1 FTE to 1.25. Because today the Minneapolis City Clerk's office proposed that rather than being just nudged upward from 48 to 49 FTE, it be expanded to 57. So how does one compare such incomparables?

https://twitter.com/GraceBannasch/status/1665098983931355139

On the one hand, the Minneapolis office is vastly larger. But on the other hand, even the one-person version of Shutesbury's office is more than 4 times as large, per capita, than even the 58-person Minneapolis office would be.

Now that Kim Crockett is the Republican endorsed candidate for Minnesota's Secretary of State, she'll try to persuade a wider audience that she's an expert on Minnesota election law. So here's a quick thread with just a few of the times she's botched really basic facts. A Secretary of State ought to at minimum know what the Secretary of State's office does. So let's start with her telling a Senate committee she received a ballot mailed by that office. Problem: they don't mail any ballots. Counties and municipalities do that.

Kim Crockett thinks she's had good reasons to vote absentee. So do other people who have voted absentee. The question is, who gets to decide. I'm OK with Ms. Crockett deciding for herself. I also trust other voters to decide for themselves. Until Ms. Crockett decided to make this a partisan issue, it wasn't one. Neither party is unified in how its adherents vote. Individual voters decide whether absentee or polling-place voting suits their circumstances. Each makes that choice as an individual, not a party member.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, in a recent letter to Senator Kiffmeyer, points to the "tremendous success" with which "nonpartisan officials from every level of government" met the challenges of 2020. Amen. In this thread, I'll highlight an easily overlooked example. The first of the challenges he lists was the huge shift toward absentee voting. It's easy to see the hand of the local election officials in that: they're the ones who issued the ballots and processed them upon return. But Simon's own office played a key role too.

Amidst all the hoo-hah about the current election, the Minnesota Court of Appeals will be hearing a petition on Thursday, filed in spring, that seeks to invalidate a long-standing rule of election administration. In this thread, I'll explain what's at stake. In 2010, the Minnesota Legislature reformed the processing of absentee ballots, which had been troublesome in the 2008 election for US Senate. They enacted a new section of statute, 203B.121, establishing absentee ballot boards with two kinds of members.

Voting should be trouble-free, so we understandably focus on the rejected ballots. But in Minnesota's August primary, one can hardly see the rejected ballots in a chart: 98% of the absentee and mail ballots were accepted. Let's zoom in on the other 2%. (Thread) To simplify, I lumped together specific reasons for rejection into three broad categories, each making up roughly 1/3 of that 2%. (There's also a catch-all "Other," but that literally is invisible in the chart.) I called those three categories Identity, Late, and Registration.

A nine-day interruption in mail delivery is a real problem. However, this article does not responsibly report on the scale of the impact on absentee ballots. 1/8 washingtonpost.com/politics/minne… The article reports from the USPS that "the stoppage delayed the arrival of two or three ballots." However, it then calls that into question as follows. 2/8

.@PioneerPress reports Minnesota voter registrations "fell off a cliff" or "dropped like a rock" and connects this to COVID-19. I don't see that connection in the data. To start the thread, here's their graph. twincities.com/2020/07/04/dur… Clearly the sharp drop from March of 2020 to April was mostly about how high March was, not how low April was. April 2020 still had more registrations than 2016 despite Stay-at-Home being in effect March 28th. Indeed even May of 2020 slightly exceeded 2016.

I got my absentee ballot for Minnesota's August primary. So did friends who are voting their first-ever Minnesota absentee ballots. They asked for a thread of tips. Tip 1: Right on the back of my mailing envelope, it says to "read and follow the enclosed instruction sheet." I'd add to also read the instructions on the ballot, the three envelopes, and the registration form, if you needed one.

Lots of people look at a chart of the past and use their imagination to extend the trend out into the future. You ought to be able to imagine multiple futures. Let's take this @MPRnews chart of Minnesota hospitalizations from @dhmontgomery as an example. (Thread.) Recently hospitalizations have been plateaued, rather like the plateau in mid May. That was a temporary leveling out in the ascending part of the curve. So maybe the downward part continues as well, with some bumps along the way, of which this is one.