The legal filings are already flying around in the impending Minnesota gubernatorial recount, with Republican nominee Tom Emmer and the state GOP filing lawsuits against two counties, St. Louis and Pine, for not satisfying their data requests immediately.
Now just to be clear, this is not the lawsuit you might be thinking of for a Minnesota recount — known as an election contest, which would come after the recount itself, and potentially delay the swearing-in of the new governor.
Rather, these are complaints that the counties involved have not delivered important election-related data to Team Emmer, such as voting-machine data, poll rosters, the names of poll workers, incident reports, ballot security information, information on absentee ballots, any communications with the campaign of Democratic nominee Mark Dayton, etc., in a timely manner.
From the state GOP’s press release:
“The unacceptable foot dragging of St. Louis and Pine Counties cannot persist. The Emmer for Governor campaign and the Republican Party of Minnesota should not have to go to court to get counties to respond to data practices requests in a timely manner. We will continue to pursue any counties that do not promptly meet their legal obligations during this process. Minnesotans deserve better,” said Republican Party of Minnesota Chairman Tony Sutton in announcing the suits.
(Back during the 2008 Senate recount, the Franken campaign had to go to court to establish that they could get some of this stuff at all — and as it turned out, there’s quite a lot of data that the campaigns can obtain.)
The suit asks the court to issue an order “Compelling Defendants to disclose the requested data immediately for a cost fairly representing the reasonable costs of collecting and copying the requested data.” That is, Team Emmer is seeking a court order that the counties in question hurry it up.
As the Star-Tribune reports, the counties say they are working on getting all this data together:
But county election officials are also required by law to update the rolls for voting history and same-day registered voters, which is priority No. 1 in most offices right now.
Patricia Stolee, St. Louis County’s Director of Elections, was unaware of the suit but said some requested items cannot be made public until the rolls are updated. She has a three-person staff working on that.
Democratic nominee Mark Dayton, a former U.S. Senator who retired after one term in 2006, leads by about 9,000 votes in the current results, a percentage margin of 0.42%. Although this is within the 0.5% margin for a hand recount under state law, many observers think that this margin is too wide for a recount to change the outcome, barring the discovery of some enormous error during the recount. By contrast, the eight-month long Minnesota Senate recount and legal contest from the 2008 election resulted in a net margin shift of only about 500 votes.
Eric Kleefeld
Eric Kleefeld joined TPM as an intern for the final months of the 2006 midterm elections, and then kept showing up for work. His other interests include guitars, old comic books and the politics of various English-speaking countries.
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