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Voting difficult in this precinct without a snorkel

City's redistricting map puts one precinct under water

November 12, 2012 at 9:58PM
(The Minnesota Star Tribune)
Minne, the lake monster, at Wirth Lake, which has no voting precinct, unlike Lake Calhoun.
Minne, the lake monster, at Wirth Lake, which has no voting precinct, unlike Lake Calhoun. (The Minnesota Star Tribune)

If anyone is planning on voting in Ward 10, Precinct 3B, that person had better have a houseboat.

Intrigued by the lack of results posted for the precinct after Tuesday's election, this reporter asked City Clerk Casey Carl where they were. He nicely noted that we obviously hadn't looked closely at the redistricted precinct map — it's entirely Lake Calhoun.

This begs the question of why assign a precinct to the lake. "It's the unintentional result of a programming error made in drawing new ward boundary lines during the redistricting process," Carl said in an e-mail.

Barry Clegg, who chairs the line-drawing Charter Commission elaborated that the software "could not draw the line around the edge of the lake without putting a census block in the wrong ward; it would just connect along the shortest distance between two points, which meant a line across the lake."

So far, there's nobody registered to vote in the precinct, a situation that's not likely to change unless Minne, the lake monster art piece that's been shuttling among city lakes, is shifted to Calhoun. But at least there's one precinct out there where there's no waiting in line to vote.

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