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Minnesota: Banana Republic?

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  December 27th, 2008 at 11:05 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Minnesota enjoys a reputation as a progressive, highly-educated, hard-working paragon of Midwestern virtue. It is the polar opposite of my adopted home state of Louisiana. Minnesota is near the top on all the “good” quality-of-life lists. Louisiana is in the cellar, or nearly so, on the same lists.

Minnesota’s 5.2 million citizens have a per capita tax burden ($2,890) that is #4 among the states, and fully 50% more than Louisiana’s ($1,782 – #34).

So what’s up with this?

Exhibit #1. My daughter attended college in Minnesota. In 2003, while driving her to school, we were nearly hit head-on by a drunk driver on the narrow 7-mile stretch of two-lane state highway that connected the college town to I-35. (The girl traveling behind us was hit and suffered serious injuries.) The road had virtually no shoulder and was unlit. There were no reflectors and the lane markings were nearly invisible.

I remember thinking at the time: “This road is substandard by Louisiana standards. It is an obvious death trap. Why don’t these people demand better?”

Exhibit #2. The Coleman-Franken debacle. Paper ballots? You gotta be kidding me. If you wanted to design a system with inherent flaws, so that any close election could be contested in the courts, you’d choose Minnesota-style paper ballots. If stray marks and X’d out circles are a basis of contesting a ballot, the range of uncertainty must be 1% or more.

Louisiana’s voting system as far as I know is uniform statewide – modern, electronic, unambiguous voting machines. Now, I’m not saying our system is perfect, but it does have some measure of integrity. At least if the Democrats aim to steal an election, they have to pay for the votes up front.

So it’s a parallel situation. Minnesota’s voting process is antiquated, even by the standards of an impoverished and electorally-challenged state. Why don’t Minnesota’s highly-educated (and highly-taxed) citizens demand better?

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COMMENTS

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  • rbdwiggins

    Demand for reform will erupt if Franken loses.

    • Diogenes314
      • rbdwiggins

        The only cries we’re likely to hear from Minnesota will be: “Count Every Vote.”

        • Diogenes314

          And then keep counting…

          Until the ACORN guy is ahead. Then stop.

  • dsmurf

    Reagan in 1984?

  • shakeit

    You are actually against paper ballots. You would prefer a system where it would theoretically be possible to flip up to 10% of the vote without leaving any trail of such misdeeds?

    • Vladimir

      Democrats prefer an inherently imperfect voting system that can ultimately be decided by friendly lawyers, judges, and in this case, a friendly Senate.

      Some third world countries have better use of technology than Minnesota has, and better electoral integrity.

      I don’t know of a case where Louisiana’s electronic system has ever been “flipped” by 10%. Or even 1%. Here, the Dems don’t have to bother; they just buy the votes the old fashioned way.

      Heck, I’d even go the purple-dye-on-the-index-finger route.

      • shakeit

        It is better that democrats can only succeed at stealing 0.05% of vote than stealing 10% of the vote.

        What exact system are you recommending? Their is no doubt that those electronic voting systems can be easily hacked. Just because their is no proven case of it, does not mean we should let such a vulnerability remain open.

        • Vladimir

          HOW DEMOCRATS CHEAT
          Multiple Registrations
          ACORN packing the rolls
          Corrupt judges keeping polls open unnecessarily late
          Corrupt poll watchers misreporting returns
          Voter intimidation (e.g. Philadelphia)
          Motor voter
          Cemetary voter
          Show up ‘n’ vote (e.g. Ohio)
          Buying votes
          Antiquated low-tech voting methods, with hanging chads and stray marks
          Counting “straight ticket” non-votes as votes (e.g. Franken)
          Nit-picking military votes

          Every Democratic initiative that involves voting has served to undermine the integrity of the process, not enhance it.

          Electronic machines are auditable. I’ll take my chances.

        • hogiewan

          just because the machines can be hacked doesn’t mean it’s easier to do than with a paper ballot. Any idiot can “lose” ballots during a recount, but there are limited number of people that can hack a machine, especially the kind used in LA where you need access to the back of the machine, where only poll workers are allowed and you’d need a terminal running the right software.

          Like Vladimir said, I’ll take my chances.

          • zuiko

            There have already been cases where machines were found with votes on them before voting even began (it was an accident, honest). That is something any corrupt election official can do. The nice thing about a machine is that any fraud is undetectable to 99.9% of the population. Paper ballot fraud is pretty obvious to even casual observers. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen… it just means the machine fraud is easier to do and get away with.

            The paper ballots are under lock and key and recounted in front of a bunch of people during a recount. That makes it hard to lose them. It is much easier to find new ones. Anyway the recount issues would be the same with machines who have a paper trail to recount.

            As for the poll workers only having access to the back of the machine… who do you think it is that commits most of the election fraud? It’s the poll workers you have to worry the most about, not some random guy off the street.

      • Achance

        Didn’t you get the memo?

      • garfield

        The reason you don’t know of a case where Louisiana’s electronic system has even been “flipped” is that there is no way to prove that a vote has been flipped with the voting machines used in Louisiana.

        There is also no way to verify that these machines — DREs — have reported the vote correctly. Consider the case in Arkansas where the voting machines reported votes for a candidate that wasn’t on the ballot, or the case in North Carolina where the number of people voting was too large to be recorded in the memory of the voting machine and the race had to be re-voted. DREs are an invitation to trouble.

        DREs should be outlawed!

  • zuiko

    #1 – We can’t build roads because that will just make traffic worse as more people drive. So the liberals tell us, anyway. I guess the solution is to build light rail line at 20x the cost per mile of urban freeway lane.

    #2 – I like optical scan. It is cheap, easy to use, and reliable. I think it is the best system out there. Of course the Democrats will use it to steal elections whenever it is close, as they do with every other voting method. Not much you can do about that.

    Of course we do not check IDs for voters. We don’t even demand ID for registration. We let you register on voting day with nothing other than someone else to vouch for you or a fake utility bill you printed up on your ink jet. Not eligible to vote? No worries… we will never find out. But that is par for the course for a blue state.

  • garfield

    Louisiana uses direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines. With these machines there will never be a recount because there are no paper ballots to recount. Furthermore, you cannot verify that the vote reported by the voting machines is the same as that cast by the voter.

    With DREs it is easy to steal an election and leave no trace. (Look at the current legal case against Ohio’s Kenneth Blackwell.) It is Louisiana that is antiquated and electronically challenged! DREs should be outlawed and, hopefully, they soon will be.

    Minnesota has a really good voting system. It is possible to recount the ballots and have reasonable certainty that the winner was actually the person receiving the most votes.

    An upgrade, although an expensive one, to the paper ballot exists. It is called a ballot marking device. The voter uses a machine similar to a DRE, but, instead of recording the votes electronically the ballot marking device prints a paper ballot which is examined by the voter before being fed into an optical scanning machine — no stray marks and the paper ballot can be recounted if a recount is needed.

  • Achance

    We had a House race in which the Republican had a one vote lead and, thus, there was an automatic State paid recount. The Party asked me to be one of three Republican observers, the Ds had three as well. Alaska uses a paper ballot and optical readers. Our registration and voter ID processes aren’t as tight as they should be but not nearly as loosy-goosey as the Blue states. So, for our purposes, the ballots were all assumed to be legit and the only question was for whom was the vote cast.

    The readers were programmed to reject all over or under voted ballots and all double marks. We used three machines and we observed as closely as possible as the ballots were fed into the machines to try and verify that they were actually catching over, unders, and doubles. They seemed remarkably accurate as in a whole days’ counting of some several thousand ballots only once did the machine improperly count a double, over, or under. That is caught when the vote read v. paper ballots cast totals don’t add up. When that happens, you recount them by machine. If there’s still a problem, you recount by hand.

    For no marks, both observers must agree it is a no mark and the Director of Elections decides any dispute, a decision subject to review as an administrative determination by the Superior Court. For double marks or improper marks, each Party’s observer makes his argument to the Director, who decides. Either party may challenge the determination and the Court decides.

    We all knew or knew of each other and while I can’t say we like each other, all of us have been around enough to get along in public, so the thing was done with no acrimony. The Ds registered three or four objections, we registered one. Our guy won by four votes. Even if the challenges all went the Ds way, our guy would still have won by one, so it is over and our guy was seated with his landslide four vote margin. I think the system worked pretty well, but we weren’t counting millions of votes with thousands of party operatives and lawyers shouting in our ears. Might be a very different thing if you knew the other party’s observer knew your boss and where you lived and was willing to act on that knowledge.

  • bs

    That Al Franken would receive enough votes to even compete in Minnesota. This alone indicates the backwardness of the state.

  • GregInFla

    These sloppy ballots keep getting decided for Franken. This simply tells me that these voters either did not really want o vote for Franken, or they are too stupid and cannot follow directions. I would apply the rules that the universities use: what the scoring machine says, goes. If the marking is not obvious, you throw it out. People need to follow directions. It’s no wonder people cannot drive or figure out if they belong in the express lane at the supermarket.

  • baseketball

    that Minnesotans “contribute” a lot of tax money to the federal government, but it’s a reasonably large state with lots of people, many of whom are wealthy. Most of the federal government is financed by New York, California, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois, Florida, Connecticut, Minnesota, et al so that’s not really anything new.

  • Vladimir

    Table footnote: “DEFINITION: Per capita tax burden in US dollars, does not include local and federal tax. The data in this statistic is a survey of state government tax collection.”

  • baseketball

    Thanks for the correction.