Counterpoint: Election cheating in Minnesota is easier than the secretary of state says

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The Aug. 30 article "Secretary of state race paints 2 views of voting" cites Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon as claiming that "a mailbox thief" would have to accurately forge a voter's signature and obtain the separate witness signature that's required to vote by mail.

Unfortunately, under the administrative rules created by Simon's predecessor and enforced by the Office of the Secretary of State, that is not true. In fact, the office has defended the rules, which say the opposite, in court.

Minnesota Rule 8210.2450 actually makes it impossible for election judges, who must compare signatures between ballot applications and signature envelopes, to do just that. In place of the law's signature-matching requirement, the rule says that a "ballot must be rejected under this subpart on the basis of the signature if the name under this subpart is clearly a different name than the name of the voter as printed on the signature envelope."

The rule then states that this is the only basis for rejection of an absentee ballot under the statute, and it allows for a variety of differing signatures to be used on one or both documents, forbidding rejection even with these differences. Thus, even if there is a signature mismatch, according to the rule, the ballot must be accepted unless the names are different.

I wish what the secretary said were true, but the Upper Midwest Law Center has had to bring a lawsuit, representing the Minnesota Voters Alliance, to challenge this rule, which does the opposite of what the secretary says.

In the Minnesota Supreme Court's March 16 decision in Minnesota Voters Alliance v. County of Ramsey, the court held that only party-balanced election judges may accept or reject absentee ballots where there is an identification number mismatch between the ballot application and the signature envelope. This category alone resulted in more than 7,000 rejections in the 2020 primary and general elections, according to secretary of state statistics. Given the misleading administrative rule for election judges, that number would likely be far higher if "signature matches" were really being done.

Sadly, unless the secretary changes the current rules, it is far too easy to cheat in Minnesota elections.