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Mail-in restrictions in Minnesota latest target of a Democratic lawsuit

Minnesota voting

Minnesota voters, like this one in Minneapolis earlier this year, face numerous obstacles to vote by mail. A lawsuit is challenging those barriers.

Stephen Maturen/Getty Images
Bill Theobald
By Bill TheobaldMay 14, 2020
Bill Theobald

Bill Theobald is senior writer at The Fulcrum, where he focuses on everything to do with voting. This December marks his 40th anniversary in the business, and he still believes -- now more than ever -- that the glow from great journalism can truly light the world.

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Another upper Midwest battleground, Minnesota, is the latest target in the barrage of litigation seeking to compel states to make voting by mail easier this year.

The new lawsuit, filed by Democrats in state court Wednesday, focuses on two aspects of Minnesota's election rules that have already been targeted as overly burdensome in several of the other suits: an Election Day deadline for the return of absentee ballots and the requirement that those envelopes have a witness signature.

Only one in eight ballots was cast by mail in Minnesota two years ago, about half the national average. But because of the coronavirus pandemic, a "mass influx of absentee voters will exacerbate existing disenfranchising laws" unless a court intervenes before the Aug. 11 primaries, said Marc Elias, the lawyer once again helming the lawsuit.

The suit says Minnesota's requirement that ballot envelopes be countersigned, by another registered voter or a notary, is punitive at a time when social distancing will likely remain highly recommended even though stay-at-home orders have been relaxed. And it says there should be a "reasonable" extension of the deadline for making sure absentee ballots are received by election offices — currently poll-closing time on election days — in a year when a surge in election mail volume and a strapped Postal Service could result in long delivery delays.

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President Trump plans to contest the state's 11 electoral votes aggressively this fall after coming within 45,000 votes, or 2 percentage points, four years ago. But the Democrat has carried the state every time since 1972, and the party also has a strong shot at picking up a pair of House seats.

The suit was filed by the National Redistricting Foundation, a Democrat-aligned group spearheaded by former Attorney general Eric Holder, on behalf of the Minnesota Alliance for Retired Americans Educational Fund and several voters.

It's part of a multimillion-dollar legal strategy announced by Democratic campaign officials in January. Elias says he has active cases in 16 states — including Wisconsin and Michigan in the upper Midwest — and several more will be filed in the coming weeks. The Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign announced last week they were doubling their legal cash commitment to $20 million in order to respond to the Democratic lawsuits.

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MERGER: The Organization that Brought Ranked Choice Voting and Ended SuperPACs in Maine Joins California’s Nonpartisan Primary Pioneers

A check mark and hands.

Photo by Allison Saeng on Unsplash. Unsplash+ License obtained by the author.

MERGER: The Organization that Brought Ranked Choice Voting and Ended SuperPACs in Maine Joins California’s Nonpartisan Primary Pioneers

Originally published by Independent Voter News.

Today, I am proud to share an exciting milestone in my journey as an advocate for democracy and electoral reform.

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Half-Baked Alaska

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Getty Images / Thanakorn Lappattaranan

Half-Baked Alaska

This past year’s elections saw a number of state ballot initiatives of great national interest, which proposed the adoption of two “unusual” election systems for state and federal offices. Pairing open nonpartisan primaries with a general election using ranked choice voting, these reforms were rejected by the citizens of Colorado, Idaho, and Nevada. The citizens of Alaska, however, who were the first to adopt this dual system in 2020, narrowly confirmed their choice after an attempt to repeal it in November.

Ranked choice voting, used in Alaska’s general elections, allows voters to rank their candidate choices on their ballot and then has multiple rounds of voting until one candidate emerges with a majority of the final vote and is declared the winner. This more representative result is guaranteed because in each round the weakest candidate is dropped, and the votes of that candidate’s supporters automatically transfer to their next highest choice. Alaska thereby became the second state after Maine to use ranked choice voting for its state and federal elections, and both have had great success in their use.

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The United States Supreme Court.

Getty Images / Rudy Sulgan

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Fourteen years ago, after the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional the popular blanket primary system, Californians voted to replace the deeply unpopular closed primary that replaced it with a top-two system. Since then, Democratic Party insiders, Republican Party insiders, minor political parties, and many national reform and good government groups, have tried (and failed) to deep-six the system because the public overwhelmingly supports it (over 60% every year it’s polled).

Now, three minor political parties, who opposed the reform from the start and have unsuccessfully sued previously, are once again trying to overturn it. The Peace and Freedom Party, the Green Party, and the Libertarian Party have teamed up to file a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Their brief repeats the same argument that the courts have previously rejected—that the top-two system discriminates against parties and deprives voters of choice by not guaranteeing every party a place on the November ballot.

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Ranked Choice Voting May Be a Stepping Stone to Proportional Representation

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Ranked Choice Voting May Be a Stepping Stone to Proportional Representation

In the 2024 U.S. election, several states did not pass ballot initiatives to implement Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) despite strong majority support from voters under 65. Still, RCV was defended in Alaska, passed by a landslide in Washington, D.C., and has earned majority support in 31 straight pro-RCV city ballot measures. Still, some critics of RCV argue that it does not enhance and promote democratic principles as much as forms of proportional representation (PR), as commonly used throughout Europe and Latin America.

However, in the U.S. many people have not heard of PR. The question under consideration is whether implementing RCV serves as a stepping stone to PR by building public understanding and support for reforms that move away from winner-take-all systems. Utilizing a nationally representative sample of respondents (N=1000) on the 2022 Cooperative Election Survey (CES), results show that individuals who favor RCV often also know about and back PR. When comparing other types of electoral reforms, RCV uniquely transfers into support for PR, in ways that support for nonpartisan redistricting and the national popular vote do not. These findings can inspire efforts that demonstrate how RCV may facilitate the adoption of PR in the U.S.

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