Help Us Restore Election Integrity (MN-MVA)

Formed in 2005, the Minnesota Voters Alliance (MVA) is the only conservative organization in Minnesota, and one of a few in the nation, dedicated solely to expanding liberty through legal action, determined to strike at the liberal forces which degrade and reduce our freedoms.

A critical component of that dedication is the ability to pursue an objective for as long as it takes to win. So, while we have achieved several recent victories in other cases, our commitment to changing Minnesota’s defective Election-Day Registration (EDR) laws continues in full force.

Today, I am requesting your support for our impending lawsuits aimed at requiring Minnesota to verify the eligibility of every voter BEFORE their votes are counted. Our recent successes are a direct result of the generous support we receive from patriots like you.

Our goal is to prevent what happened in 2008 when U.S. Senator Al Franken was elected by 312 votes out of 2.9 million cast. In that race, more than 500,000 voters registered on election-day, voted, and had their eligibility verified after the election. Our data requests revealed that more than 48,000 of those 500,000 individuals could not be confirmed as being eligible to vote.

The 2016 election will be the first presidential year in which Minnesota’s new “no excuse” absentee voting will be in effect.

That system creates an open invitation for ineligible voters to vote because voter registrations that accompany the absentee ballot are not checked for eligibility until after the election. As a result, it is likely that the number of unchecked voters in 2016 will skyrocket.

We are mounting the most serious and specific challenge to the State’s stonewalling of voter registration and eligibility information ever undertaken.

The MVA is taking advantage of the recent close race in Minnesota House District 48A (Eden Prairie and Minnetonka) to create legal standing to get into Hennepin County District Court with urgency, showing the court a concrete example that it can both understand and recognize as a sound basis for the MVA’s arguments.

Specifically, the MVA will sue the Secretary of State and the Department of Public Safety for violating the Minnesota Data Practices Act by denying the MVA requests for information.

Those requests demand listings of persons in the voter registration database whose statuses are Inactive, Challenged, Deceased, and Deleted, as well as lists of persons known to be ineligible to vote because they are felons, incompetent, or non-citizens.

We have requested those lists from the Secretary of State’s (SOS’s) Office and from the Department of Public Safety (DPS), both of which do not admit they have lists of ineligible persons and, in any case, refuse to disclose them.

The statutes indicate such lists exist, for example, Minnesota Statute:

201.158 USE OF DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY DATA.

“As required by the Help America Vote Act of 2002, Public Law 107-252, the commissioner of public safety shall make electronic data on citizenship available to the secretary of state. The secretary of state must determine whether the data newly indicates that any individuals who have active records in the statewide voter registration system are

201.158 USE OF DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY DATA.

Similar statutes exist that require state agencies, such as the Department of Corrections, to send lists of ineligible felons to the Secretary of State.

Yet, when we make Data Practices Act requests we get back the following from the Secretary of State’s Office:

”To the extent that the Office of the Secretary of State has this information, members of the public are entitled only to the public information list…”

and from the Department of Public Safety: “…please be advised that the Department of Public Safety does not keep track of this data.”

These state agencies have put up a solid stone wall that prevents the public from seeing how well, if at all, they are following the statutes and undercuts our ability to compare lists of voters with lists of ineligible persons. The wall needs to be torn down.

With your support, the MVA can take this case all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court which is where it is likely to end up because the Secretary of State and the Department of Public safety are really determined to prevent the public from seeing what they have and what they are doing.

Any degree of victory in this lawsuit will represent a historic success over previous attempts to crack open what is really going on with voter registration in this state, and will provide a critical stepping stone to forcing the state to prevent ineligible Election Day registrants from voting.

We need to raise $6,500 in the next two weeks! We are grateful to a major donor who is offering to match every dollar we receive from this appeal, effectively doubling the value of each contribution from supporters like yourself.

Please consider a contribution of $50, $100, $250 or $500 to help us reach our goal! Your money will not be working alone. You are partnering with an amazing group of selfless leaders who choose to stand up and defend the constitution and the rule of law.

There is no one, other than the MVA and its attorneys, who is capable of taking this on. It must be done to protect the 2016 elections. Your contribution would be of tremendous help in funding the kind of support this legal action will require.

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