Mansky’s Office tries Deception in Election Transparency Controversy
When Minnesota Majority’s request to inspect election documents in Ramsey County was met with stonewalling, we transmitted an email alert to our members residing there. Ramsey county residents have since been calling and emailing Ramsey County elections to demand transparency. The department has begun to respond – not with compliance, but deception.
This is the canned response they’ve developed:
Information from the 2012 State General Election is still being processed. We hope to be completed with this work on or around February 1st, 2012. At that point, up-to-date public information lists will be available from the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office. (Minnesota Statutes 201.091)."
For those uninitiated in the arcana of election administration jargon, this probably sounds like compliance, but it isn’t.
The “public information lists” are CD ROMs sold by the secretary of state’s office for $46, containing edited voter data, mainly the names and addresses of registered voters. This disk is commonly used by political campaigns to print labels for campaign mailers. It’s not a mystery that the disk will be available. They’re always available.
Minnesota Majority’s Data Practices Act request was not for a "public information list." We know where to get that and it’s eventual availability was never in question. We requested access to inspect original paper documents that are retained (by law) for a period of 22 months after every election before they are destroyed to make room for the next batch.
When Ramsey County residents call Joe Mansky’s office to demand to know why he’s concealing election records that he used to make available, instead of an explanation, his staff is attempting to mislead people with a red herring.
If you don’t approve of Mansky’s new apparent passion to eliminate transparency in the election system, or his deceptive tactics in dealing with the People he works for, give his office a call or send an email by following this link: http://capwiz.com/mnmajority/callalert/index.tt?alertid=62313516