by Steve Timmer

Nov 2, 2012, 5:30 PM

In Minnesota, the dead cannot vote

Yet, they are able to endorse

A Better Legislature reports that two persons in Keith Downey’s recent endorsement ad in the Edina Sun Current were, as ABL delicately puts it, “no longer living.” One of the decedents died in June of this year, and the other passed — again, to use the ABL terminology — in July of 2011, information obtained by ABL from public obituaries.

The braying and pearl clutching by the Downey supporters began immediately, of course; one ankle biter intoning that anybody could sign up as a supporter on Downey’s website. Apparently, this is true. But, just for fun, go over to Keith Downey’s website and sign up as a supporter as, say, Mickey Mouse or Che Guevara and see how long it stays up. No, don’t really do that; these people have no sense of humor.

As ABL observes, the people in the ad are as described as “friends and neighbors” of Keith Downey. Not close friends, again apparently.

But this little flap does serve to illustrate what Katherine Kersten might call a “larger point.” (I don’t mean this is one her larger points; she just likes to use the phrase when she is getting ready to tell us what all the silly little anecdotes she has been recounting mean.) And it deserves to be made against a candidate like Downey who voted for the poisonous voter restriction amendment and who has been part of the campaign of innuendo and misinformation about Minnesota’s admirable voting system.

The two dead people who endorsed Keith Downey are undoubtedly long gone from the rolls of registered voters in Minnesota. Why? Well, because the Secretary of State’s Office regularly downloads information from a variety of sources to check the accuracy of the registered voter rolls, including the Minnesota Department of Health’s death certificate records, and the database of the Social Security Administration which reports deaths around the country (a check instituted by Mark Ritchie, and not his predecessor, Mary Kiffmeyer, by the way), and a database called the National Death Registry.

We’ve written about this before in Dan McGrath sees dead people.

Finally, we’ve received many lit pieces this week trying to make Melisa Franzen look bad in photographs. Amateurs.