LWV refutes township official on voting falsehoods

By Brian Arola

barola@mankatofreepress.com

WASHINGTON TOWNSHIP — A Le Sueur County township’s board narrowly voted to retain mail-in voting recently, after a group of residents pushed to go back to inperson elections.

The 2-1 vote Nov. 27 by Washington Township supervisors set the voting process for the 2024 primary and general elections. The township includes areas between Lake Washington and Lake Jefferson, north of Madison Lake and south of Cleveland.

The meeting and a contentious survey process leading up to it drew the League of Women Voters’ attention, with the nonpartisan group’s Minnesota executive director accusing one township supervisor of spreading false information about mail-in voting in an attempt to sow distrust in election security.

“Good governance would not go door to door spreading false information about how our elections work,” said LWV Minnesota Executive Director Michelle Witte of Township Supervisor Marie Meyer.

Meyer, elected in 2022, voted against retaining mail-in elections, while supervisors Greg Davis and Steven Biehn voted in favor of it. Reached for comment, Meyer accused the League of Women Voters of having an agenda and being dishonest, while saying her fellow supervisors disregarded the will of the people.

“Everyone could have been happy but instead the other two supervisors are dictating which way everyone has to vote,” she said, adding she doesn’t

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trust the security of mailin voting.

Davis, who along with Biehn has served as a board supervisor since the 1980s, cited cost savings, higher participation rates, and struggles finding and training election judges among the reasons for keeping the mail-in voting system that has been in place since 2018.

The township already had high voter turnout rates leading up to 2018, but participation rose by 2.9% to reach 93.5% overall in the first election after the decision — the township currently has 649 registered voters, according to the survey sent out to residents.

The voting process followed what many other townships were doing, Davis said. No one seemed to take issue with the process until after the 2020 election, he added, and then claims about mail-in ballots not being secure and voting machines getting hacked arose.

“I just don’t know where all of these fraud claims are coming from,” he said.

Biehn also said he knew of no reported problems with the mailin voting system, saying he disagreed with the idea that it isn’t a secure way to conduct an election.

Election claims

False claims about mass voter fraud and lack of election security bubbled up around the country after then-President Donald Trump lost to President Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Trump, who has repeatedly falsely claimed the election was rigged against him, was recently indicted for his attempt to overturn election results in Georgia — his own party’s leaders in the state recertified Biden’s win following statewide recounts.

The falsehoods spread by Meyer, according to Witte, were on printouts handed out by Meyer to go along with the survey on voting preferences this fall. Witte provided a point-by-point response to the printout’s claims.

The printout, and Meyer during a phone call, claimed Minnesota’s new Drivers’ License for All law will potentially register anyone who applies for a license to vote regardless of their citizenship status. This is false, Witte said, as the law’s language states “documentation or verification of United State citizenship” isn’t needed to obtain a license but is needed for someone to be registered to vote.

“We have always had noncitizens with driver’s licenses,” she said. “This includes legal immigrants with green cards or visas. The safeguards and processes in place have ensured that they are not improperly registered to vote.”

Another claim on the sheet, which includes the name Dale “Doc” Schmoll on it along with Meyer’s name, suggests people receive more than one ballot during mail-in elections, whereas in-person voting would ensure each person only gets one ballot. People may receive more than one ballot in the mail, Witte said, because there are primary and general ballots sent out during a given election year.

Mail-in ballots also feature a unique bar code assigned to only one voter, Witte said, a system in place to verify only one ballot gets counted per voter.

Six other claims on the sheet ranged from false to misleading, according to Witte’s rebuttal. She attended the Nov. 27 meeting with LWV member and township resident Cindy Olson and intended to read out a statement correcting the falsehoods, but they said the group of residents running the meeting shut them down.

By rule, a group of township residents can petition to hold a special meeting and then elect a moderator to conduct the meeting. The gathering essentially consisted of two parts: one to open up and discuss survey results followed by a regular supervisors meeting to set the voting method.

In an email, Meyer stated only matters listed on the notice of the meeting could be discussed at the meeting, which didn’t include the League of Women Voters members’ “arguments.”

“They were out of line,” she stated. “This was not their meeting.”

To Witte, the fact the group of residents and the moderator shut down people who wanted to discuss the survey and sheet showed they had no interest in having a real conversation about the voting system.

Survey process

The survey split was about 207 township voters indicating a preference for in-person voting and 138 indicating a preference for mail-in voting, according to Davis. As a percentage of all registered voters, the totals equal 32% and 21% of registered voters, respectively.

The results showed “the people” want to vote in person, Meyer said.

“There’s absentee voting for those who don’t want to get out of their chair,” she said. “A lot of people like the ritual of Election Day. You go to your town hall and vote.”

Meyer described first getting interested in the security of mail-in voting in 2020 when her husband and she didn’t receive a signature envelope with their mail-in ballots. She described returning the “naked ballot” in person at the Le Sueur County Government Center and was told it wasn’t needed in the county, leading her to question whether her vote was counted.

Residents who prefer to drop their ballot off or vote in person can do so at the Le Sueur County Government Center. Going to Le Center isn’t the same as in-person voting within Washington Township, though, Meyer said.

Because of the falsehoods spread about how mail-in voting works, Witte said, it’s hard not to see the survey as tainted. She made clear the League of Women Voters — which describes itself as a nonpartisan voting advocacy nonprofit — supports citizens participating in the democratic process, and also sees both in-person and mail-in voting as worthy options, but the reasoning for removing one of the options shouldn’t be undergirded by misinformation.

“The majority of township supervisors followed the facts,” she said. “They know mail-in voting works and is accurate. It saves taxpayer money and more people participate. They’re all pieces of the pie along with the survey presented.”

Raising doubts about secure elections has a damaging impact on voter trust, Olson said.

“Disinformation like this creates doubt in the minds of voters and makes them more afraid of potential fraud in the system, when there are so many safeguards that should give us a lot of confidence,” she said.

To Meyer, sticking with mail-in elections was a purely political move to go along with the preferred voting method of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in a majority-Republican area. Asked why the DFL wants mail-in voting, she said she didn’t know then changed the subject to recent laws passed by the DFL-majority to codify transgender and abortion rights.

“Why did they want to make Minnesota a sanctuary state for little children to have transexual hormone blockers and procedures?” she asked.

In-person voting makes use of voting machines.

Asked if she trusts voting machines, Meyer said “not necessarily, but I trust my ballot when I can put the ballot into the machine a whole lot more than putting it in the mail.”

The cost of in-person voting shouldn’t be any reason not to return to it, she added. She noted cost wasn’t an issue for her fellow supervisors when they voted to fully fund a new ramp for people with disabilities — she wanted to pay for half of the project.

Meyer also questioned whether voter rolls used to mail out ballots are up to date, citing examples of surveys sent to addresses of people who have since moved out of Washington Township.

Since the majority of supervisors didn’t listen to the residents calling for change, she said voters will just have to put up with the decision for now.

“Being we have no choice on which way to vote, we better hope they’re secure,” she said.

Witte encouraged people who have questions about election security to get involved as election judges to see how many safeguards are in place. People looking for more information on voting systems and security, meanwhile, can check out the LWV’s www. vote411.org page.

Washington Township’s recent dispute wasn’t unheard of in Minnesota, Witte said. She described groups in other communities spreading false information about voting in recent years.

Being engaged in local governance is healthy, she said, but groups should be responsible about the information they spread while doing so.

“We absolutely support citizens petitioning their government,” she said. “All of that is great; what we would object to is sharing false information.”

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