Endorsement: Secretary of State: Mark Ritchie is best

10/30/2006

The issue is voter participation, not election fraud.

Star Tribune Endorsement
Published: October 21, 2006

So a woman’s walking down University Avenue and sees this man at the corner, waving his arms and clapping his hands. “What are you doing?” she asks. “Keeping the elephants away!” he replies. “But there are no elephants in Minnesota,” she says. He smiles: “See what a great job I’m doing?”

This story came to mind the other day as Mary Kiffmeyer was making her case for a third term as secretary of state. It’s been eight years since she first won the office (with a 47 percent plurality, a political unknown benefiting from the Year of Jesse), and still she’s beating the drum against vote fraud, virtually nonexistent in Minnesota—while claiming credit for high-turnout trends that long predate her.

But there’s nothing amusing about Kiffmeyer’s actual record. Her policies and practices have had the steady effect—some would say the partisan intent, as well—of discouraging voter participation. She has opposed voting by mail, proposed to decorate polling places with alarmist warning posters about terrorism, and exasperated local elections officials statewide with changing directives about balloting practices and voter identification requirements. Worst, she continues to advocate for requiring voters to produce a photo ID card—a move that would directly undercut Minnesota’s proud tradition of allowing same-day registration and voting by citizens who are elderly, disadvantaged, new to the state or, well, organizationally challenged.

Attentive Minnesotans have learned from disgraceful examples around the country that monkeying with the mechanics of registration, voting and ballot-counting has become the modern method for manipulating election outcomes. Also, that Kiffmeyer’s Republican Party is usually the leading beneficiary of measures that discourage participation at the polls.

Even if that weren’t so, we would urge voters to replace Kiffmeyer with a candidate possessing both commitment and credentials to make voting easier for all Minnesotans. It would be hard to design a better contender than Mark Ritchie.

Remember the black “NOVEMBER 2” bumper stickers that became ubiquitous in 2004? Those were Ritchie’s handiwork as leader of National Voice, a coalition of 1,000 nonpartisan groups across the United States that brought more than 5 million new voters to the polls.

Ritchie is a DFLer who has spent most of his career outside party politics. After working briefly in the Perpich administration’s Agriculture Department, he founded the nonprofit Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, an international research organization focused on improving the economic and environmental sustainability of rural communities.

He is far more engaged by policy than by politics, and his close study of the secretary’s office over the last 18 months has given him deep knowledge and creative ideas about all of its functions. This, especially, elevates him above the Independence Party’s Joel Spoonheim, who has some appealing but only half-formed ideas about refashioning an Office of Citizen Engagement under an appointed, nonpartisan steward.

After eight years of distractions, diversions and general retreat from the scrupulous professionalism of Joan Growe, the secretary of state’s office needs Mark Ritchie and his steady emphasis on ensuring that all Minnesotans can vote with ease—and with confidence in the system’s fairness and security.