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Members of the Minnesota National Guard surround the statet Capitol on May 31.
Claim: President deployed National Guard to Minn. over objections of state leaders. Fact check: False
Jul 06 2020
"Minnesota's Democrat governor [Tim Walz] failed to urgently deploy the National Guard — it took President Trump for that to eventually happen; his suggestion — and the ultimate descendance into chaos there in Minneapolis." — White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, June 29
President Trump and his team repeated multiple times that he was responsible for deploying the National Guard to deal with rioting in Minnesota. The first time Trump took credit for the deployment was during an interview with Nexstar on June 17.
"I brought it out five days after they started. They wouldn't use the National Guard. I brought the National Guard to — I told them, I said, 'You got to get the National Guard.' We got them in," he told Nexstar. "Everything stopped in Minneapolis. It was really an amazing thing, actually, to see, and they had no problems after we called out the Guard."
Two days later, Trump tweeted: "Forced Democrat run Minnesota to bring in the National Guard & end rioting & looting after seeing the destruction & crime in Minneapolis."
White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany made a similar claim during her official briefing on June 29.
But it was actually Minnesota's Democratic governor, Tim Walz, and not Trump, who deployed the Minnesota National Guard. Walz, who served in the Army National Guard for 24 years, first activated the Guard on May 28, more than seven hours before Trump publicly threatened to do it himself. According to his office, he was not acting under the president's advice, but rather under requests from officials in Minneapolis and St. Paul — cities also run by Democrats. Furthermore, the Guard was deployed two days after the riots had started, rather than the five claimed by Trump.
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A federal judge has rejected the method for determining ballot order in Minnesota elections, instead ordering a lottery.
Lottery will assign ballot order in Minnesota, federal judge rules
Jun 16 2020
A lottery should assign partisan billing on Minnesota ballots this year, a federal judge has decided.
The rules of probability say the decision will be a victory for Democratic candidates, who would be listed below the Republicans under the current system.
Challenges to the arcane rules of ballot design have become a feature of the multifaceted campaign of Democratic voting rights lawsuits this year. They're also being watched by good government advocates, who favor getting rid of any election rule written by the party in power to preserve its influence at the expense of old-fashioned electoral competition.
<p>Minnesota's ballot ordering is unusual, with the parties featured in the reverse order of their most recent statewide performance. Judge Susan Richard Nelson on <a href="https://www.democracydocket.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/41/2020/06/MN-Ballot-Order.pdf" target="_blank">Monday decided</a> that was still not altogether fair and that a random drawing should determine which of several parties with statewide credibility will get top billing in November, when both President Trump and Joe Biden have a shot at winning the state's 10 electoral votes.</p><p>The higher ballot position alone would give the GOP candidates a boost of 2 to 3 percentage points if the system stays as is, according to research done for the Democrats who filed the suit. Hillary Clinton carried the state by just 1.5 points last time.</p><p>Political operatives pay so much attention to the vote-getting power of topping the ballot that they have nicknames for it including the "primacy effect," the "windfall vote" and the "donkey vote."</p><p>Democratic Party groups have also filed similar lawsuits in <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/ballot-position-lawsuit" target="_blank">Arizona, Georgia and Texas</a> — all potential 2020 battlegrounds where the laws now benefit the Republicans who control the state government. A federal appeals court in April rejected a similar challenge to <a data-linked-post="2645885353" href="https://thefulcrum.us/florida-ballot-position-2645885353" target="_blank">the rules in Florida</a>, the biggest presidential swing state.</p><p>At the same time Nelson blocked the current system, she also rejected Secretary of State Steve Simons' bid to get the suit dismissed.</p><p>Stanford political scientist Jonathan Rodden conducted the research looking at the impact of ballot order on election results in Minnesota in the 21 federal elections since 1982. A faculty colleague, Jon Krosnick, reviewed 70 years of research on the subject of ballot primacy and concluded being higher on the ballot "almost always" gives that candidate an advantage.</p>
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Minnesota voters, like this one in Minneapolis earlier this year, face numerous obstacles to vote by mail. A lawsuit is challenging those barriers.
Mail-in restrictions in Minnesota latest target of a Democratic lawsuit
May 14 2020
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.
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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St. Paul city council member Dai Thao faced charges in 2017 for helping a Hmong woman, who had trouble seeing, translate and complete her ballot. The charges were ultimately dropped.
Help at the polls won't be limited in Minnesota under latest voting rights settlement
Apr 29 2020
Minnesota has agreed to abandon two of its most unusual and harsh election rules, which have restricted help for people casting ballots — the freshest victory in the barrage of voting rights litigation in this year's battleground states.
The state laws at issue bar candidates from helping others vote and say that no one else may help more than three people complete in-person or absentee ballots in any election. With the lawsuit settlement, announced Tuesday, Arkansas will be the only other state with such strict limits on providing voting assistance.
<p>The intent of Minnesota's law was to prevent campaign operatives from manipulating the votes of elderly, disabled and non-English-speaking voters. But the suit argued the statute was a direct violation of the <a href="https://thefulcrum.us/voting-rights-act" target="_self">Voting Rights Act</a>, which says voters needing assistance have the right to choose whomever they want, and denied voters their political and free speech rights under the federal and state constitutions.</p><p>Three years ago, a federal appeals court struck down, for similar reasons, a law in Texas requiring language interpreters at the polls to be registered voters in the county where they were offering aid.</p><p>The new settlement was in <a data-linked-post="2645139715" href="https://thefulcrum.us/minnesota-voting" target="_blank">a suit filed in February</a> by the <a data-linked-post="2638969815" href="https://thefulcrum.us/american-civil-liberties-union" target="_blank">American Civil Liberties Union</a> on behalf of four Hmong-Americans. The principal plaintiff was Dai Thao, a St. Paul city council member running for mayor in 2017 faced charges for helping a neighbor, a Hmong woman who had trouble seeing, both translate and complete her ballot. The charges were ultimately dropped.</p><p>The Twin Cities has the nation's largest Hmong population. And almost 11 percent of Minnesotans have a disability that could lead them to seek help voting, the ACLU said.</p><p>A similar claim had been brought a few weeks earlier by the Democratic congressional campaign committees, a piece of the party's broad array of nearly two-dozen suits hoping to get rules that potentially suppress the vote relaxed before November. The Republicans are fighting many of them, but now their defense in Minnesota is moot.</p><p>But the partisan fight continues in a second Minnesota suit, a challenge in federal court to the state's laws about the order in which each party's candidates are listed on the November ballot.</p><p>The Democratic nominee has carried Minnesota in 11 straight elections, but President Trump came within 2 points (45,000 votes) last time and has vowed to go hard after the state's 10 electoral votes this fall.</p><p>Two of the state's top elected Democrats, Secretary of State Steve Simon and Attorney General Keith Ellison, were technically in charge of defending the assistance restrictions but said after the settlement was announced that they were thrilled to see the provisions abandoned.</p>
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