Exhausting! Hennepin County claims it exhausted party list for ballot board

In an ongoing dispute over the composition of ballot boards, Hennepin County claimed they “exhausted” the list of election judges put forward by the Republican Party because they forwarded the names directly to city election offices. The county believes sending the names to cities for use as election-day judges means they could go ahead and appoint their staff to serve on the ballot board, charged with accepting or denying absentee ballots received in the mail. The county also claimed in their brief to the State Supreme Court that since none of the submitted names live in the specific precinct where the ballot board activities take place, they are in compliance with state law.

Once again we are treated to some of the most creative legal reasoning in the country. Unfortunately, Minnesota courts often agree with this creativity in their ever-present desire to avoid tough decisions.

Instead of using some of the submitted judges sent by the parties for the county-wide ballot boards, election officials claim they ran out of names because they sent them all to the cities. In their place, they use Hennepin County elections staff and their own partisan election judges to achieve party balance. But can we trust that there are any Republicans working daily on the acceptance of absentee ballots?

The county’s filing with the court was in answer to a petition filed by the Minnesota Voters Alliance, the Republican Party of Minnesota and several election judges who were on the list submitted to the county. The petition was filed by our friends at the Upper Midwest Law Center. The Supreme Court has not signaled when they will rule on the petition, even though the election is less than two weeks away and the ballot board is accepting thousands of absentee ballots every day.

Secretary of State Steve Simon is not a party to the petition, but the Court asked him to weigh in. Predictably, he supported the Hennepin County position. But he also argued Hennepin County doesn’t have to use the party lists at all, ignoring Minnesota Voters Alliance v. County of Ramsey, which clarified during the 2022 election that counties do have to consult party lists when putting together their ballot boards.

Hennepin County claims in their filings they need to recruit over 6,000 election judges to administer the election and the parties just didn’t give them enough names (1,927). In the future, the legislature will have to put an end to this creative interpretation with plain language stating counties must reserve party-submitted election judges for use on their ballot boards. Or the parties will have to overwhelm counties with more election judges than they can use.

The media and the Left (redundant?) often wonder why conservatives don’t trust our elections (see latest polling here). Look no further than the state’s top election officials going out of their way to avoid the clear intent of the legislature to provide partisan balance in the counting of the vote.