Counterpoint: State election laws are good enough

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D.J. Tice revisits the Coleman/Franken election contest of 2008 as grounding for a straw-man argument against supposed claims of perfection for Minnesota's election laws ("Minnesota's case study in election imperfection, Oct. 10.) If we look at this year's disputes in a more realistic fashion, we see that 2008 can indeed teach us a lesson, just not the one Tice thinks it teaches.

Neither party has asserted that Minnesota's current election laws are perfect. Instead, the disagreements between DFL incumbent Secretary of State Steve Simon and GOP challenger Kim Crockett are twofold:

First, are the laws good enough that our elections are more than a sham?

And second, how should they be improved?

Simon has been quite clear that there is room for improvement. However, he also has expressed confidence that elections conducted under our current laws achieve the basic function of an election: They allow the citizens to know which candidate really commanded the most support from the electorate.

By contrast, Crockett has repeatedly claimed that as an ordinary citizen, she doesn't have any way of knowing whether President Joe Biden's 233,012 vote margin in 2020 was real or whether former President Donald Trump might in fact have had more support among Minnesota's voters in 2020.

She accepts that under the existing legal regime, Biden's electors were certified, and that this is final. But she does not accept that this provided her any way of knowing that Biden in fact had the greater support.

In other words, she does not view our current election laws as merely having room for improvement. She views them as so bad as to render our supposed election essentially a Potemkin village, a simulacrum that we've all agreed to abide by as though it were an election.

So the two candidates are expressing dramatically different views as to the status quo. But they also express different views of how to move forward. Simon has called for careful, deliberate, incremental improvement. Crockett demands radical changes.

Ironically, some of the radical changes that Crockett demands are to undo the 2010 legislative response to the 2008 Coleman/Franken contest. That legislation was a bipartisan achievement, with co-authors who included former Republican Secretary of State Mary Kiffmeyer and then-future Secretary Simon.

As Tice correctly notes, the 2008 troubles centered around inconsistent standards for deciding whether to accept or reject absentee ballots, including the use of signature comparison to verify the identity of the submitter.

So in 2010, the Legislature enacted a reform package that provided greater consistency. Previously, some parts of the state did their accept/reject decisions on Election Day in precinct polling places and other parts of the state did it in advance in absentee ballot boards. Since 2010, the absentee ballot board process has been used statewide. That way, voters statewide know the review will be done the same way and that if their ballot is rejected, they will learn of this in time to submit a replacement or vote in person.

The 2010 legislation also added personal identifying numbers to absentee ballot applications and signature envelopes. The absentee ballot board members are now only required to ponder the similarity of handwritten signatures if the identifying numbers don't match or are absent.

Crockett's radical proposals include not only some that would be new to Minnesota, but also others that would take us back to the bad old days. In particular, both of these legislative responses to 2008 are on her chopping block. She has called for returning absentee ballot processing to precinct polling places. And she has argued that signatures ought to be compared, even when identifying numbers match.

So if Tice wants to remind us of the 2008 troubles — as indeed he should — then that is an argument for not rashly returning to that world. The rash candidate is the one who thinks our status quo is so terrible we can't know who won even decisive elections: Kim Crockett.

Max Hailperin, of Minneapolis, is a retired professor of mathematics, computer science and statistics.