<NEWS RELEASE>

The Minnesota Majority, joined by several state legislators and concerned citizens, launched a lawsuit in the Minnesota Supreme Court Thursday, charging that Secretary of State Mark Ritchie and 25 county election have failed to comply with election laws.

The action was announced in a press conference Thursday morning.

The lawsuit is based upon research recently conducted by Minnesota Majority. The Minnesota Majority compared the Minnesota Statewide Voter Registration System (SVRS) to the official 2008 State Canvassing Board Report (SCBR) and discovered what it perceived as a discrepancy of over 400,000 votes. 

Further investigation revealed that voter history updates have not been posted in over 800 precincts spanning 25 counties, said Jeff Davis, president of the Minnesota Majority and a plaintiff in the lawsuit.  Both the SVRS and the SCBR were provided by the Minnesota Secretary of State's office.  In late April, Bert Black, legal counsel to Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, told Minnesota Majority that SVRS voter history updates pertaining to the 2008 general election had been completed by all counties.

The federal Help America Vote Act (HAVA) and Minnesota statute 201.171 require the Secretary of State and county election officials to update the Statewide Voter Registration System (SVRS) immediately following an election.  Minnesota Statute specifies that the task must be completed no later than six weeks following an election. But nearly 7 months after the November 2008 election, voter registration records are still not updated, the Minnesota Majority said..

The lawsuit targets 25 counties that are missing voter history updates for one or more precincts.  There are 18 additional counties that have ballot-to-voter history discrepancies in excess of 1% of the counted ballots.  "There are thousands of precincts in which there is a discrepancy between ballot counts and voter history tallies,” said  Davis. 

Excluding precincts for which there was no voter history results posted in SVRS, Minnesota Majority says there are 2,247 precincts with more ballots than voters, totaling 39,185 ballots that cannot be accounted for by voter histories in SVRS.  By comparison, there were 1,063 precincts with fewer ballots than SVRS voters, totaling 2,066 votes, Davis said.  "This isn't simply a minor recordkeeping error,” said Davis. "If we cannot trust our election officials to perform the basic job of balancing their books, how can we possibly have confidence in our election system?”

"The state legislature wrote our laws to ensure integrity and transparency in our elections,” said District 19B State Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Delano. "I'm troubled to see that the laws aren't being followed by the officials who we have entrusted to administer our elections.  Instead of transparency, we have mud.  How can we determine what's going on if we can't even balance the vote totals?”

District 35B State Representative Mark Buesgens, R-Jordan, added, "This is simply unacceptable. The people of Minnesota deserve an election system they can be confident in and frankly, this doesn't inspire much confidence in me.”