good evening and welcome to this forum on the future of voting sponsored by the white bear lake area league of women voters my name is liz knurling and i will be the moderator this evening i am pleased to welcome our secretary of state mark ritchi mike was first elected minnesota secretary of state in november of two thousand and six and previous to that he served as the president of the institute for agriculture in trade policy from one nine hundred eighty eight to two thousand and six he also founded the league of rural voters a graduate of iowa state university and the university of minnesota's humphrey school of public affairs in two thousand and eleven he received the dwight david eisenhower excellence in public service award i'm pleased to welcome secretary of state rich now i have submitted questions in advance to secretary ridge and i i hope you're ready we have lots of fun and the first one is going to be on electronic rostered task force we know that you are the co chair of the electronic roster task force that was created by the two thousand and thirteen legislature to research several issues including the following electronic roster technology the ability use photographs receive from the department of vehicle services data security and electronic and the statewide voter registration system and the ability of precincts across the state to connect to an elector nick roster to secure network to access the state wide voter registration system we understand that the task force must submit a report summarizing its findings and listing recommendations on the implementation of electronic rosters by january thirty first of this year so the cursed question is could just summarize the findings or recommendations on the implementation of electronic rosters that the task force will include in its report at the twenty fourteen legislature but there's about twenty four hours of testimony so the answer to your question is no but i can give you a little bit of information about electronic whole books and i think this is probably of some heightened interest because for all of us we're confronted with the contradictions of the advantages that our electronic devices can provide and the dangers whether those are hacking or loss or just frustration whatever so many of you who have been poll workers or most of you i'm assuming have voted then you know more or less our process  use paper ballots we also have paper registers where you sign this is one of the many systems we use as part of our backup system but also part of our integrity system some states have  introduced tronic rosters and some states who done that have found that there are savings in time time meaning money for local officials typically this is at the county level but  because you have the ability to upload the information that comes from signing in or and this is actually the biggest cost savings is in the area of same day registration minnesota in a big year let's say an open presidential year about six hundred thousand of us will register on election day the it means that after election day our local election officials have a tremendous job and since so many people scribble on their paper voter registration forms there's the additional work not just the six hundred thousand that must be tired but the interpretation of hand writing and been the mistakes that are made many thing so there are some benefits that have been documented in other states and in minnesota one community minute tonka has been testing some systems that are more electronic and in this  last year in addition to this task force there also was mandated a test in some polling places of some of the tronic polling equipment i think six or seven vendors something like that so we have the benefit of both twenty some hours of testimony and discussion and some pilot projects in the polling places and in a way both of those reports will come at the same time and they will lead us into i believe a next trial where for some communities that have high numbers of same day voter registrations where the postie of really injuring that data and getting that data right has gotten very large we believe that there are some savings and they're going to test and do a test in a way that we can compare apples to apples to see if that's true so i feel like we were taking baby steps other states around us some have adopted this but the same day registration states for example north dakota doesn't have voter registration it's not something they use in their system they have a different system an excellent system so we are taking a slow but sure step towards getting more information and i think that's an appropriate thing it will be up to the legislature to make some of these decisions but you'll see those recommendations as you mention on the thirty first so besides helping with same day registration what are the other advantages of electronic rosters over papermaster that we currently  it can be less expensive but in some instances it can be more expensive so it's situational more than it's a sweeping thing i think this is true for all technologies some technology can't be assumed  for everyone but other technology it depends on the circumstance about half of our polling places in the state are townships some townships don't have a just city they might have twelve voters there  already mandated required to have certain very expensive so i'd say it's not possible to just be sweeping but let me give you a little insight into one of the advantages that we see in general about some of the technology and that's that when there is a more accurate way to make sure that a name is properly sparrow and the address is properly updated we call that a clean record then you have the capacity to use of electronic lists to help keep your list clean i experience something that perhaps some of you have that i'm a candidate for office and i call up people and sometimes it's delegate said you have this experience if you've been running for office or just calling which is you asked for betty and you hear applause and you kind of know what's coming which is that my wife died two years ago will you please take her name off your list and this might have occurred because the name was better your lips of birth but when you get the information about death in a death record in school complicated you have to have clean lives to be able to get information and have that happen i also have the experience of people calling me and my daughter's been dead for over ten years and they asked for her because her name is still on the list because somewhere the system does not take her name off the list so i experience this myself and i hate it so one of the advantages of electronic the rich ration of time poll is a clean list america clean list it might be just to much of protecting our hearts perhaps avoiding awkward or upsetting situations but also if you warm up cleanest even if you're a candidate you don't want extra people's names you don't want to spend the money for the door knob so there are arguments in good reasons for clean list can electronics and digital help us get the clean list yes i think so in some instances so what's the cost benefit analysis and where does it really start to make sense  for so there's a nine step process before somebody goes on the roster and then updating it has some other steps but updating in almost all but with one exception take place at the county level so let me just say that when somebody does register there's a series of steps that it must go through you know we depend on electronic databases or information from the department of vehicle services it's kind of a first check to see if somebody is in that system and if they're part of that system does that driver's license match up there isn't a driver's license to department vehicle services uses the social security typically the office in washington to see it that last four lines up and if there's a problem with that then there's a system that works but if those things match then we begin to compare data with the department of health who is maintenance of the death registry with in our state is supplemental with what we used to call the national death registry that is somewhat in some disarray at the moment but there are systems at the national level snowbirds go to florida if you die in florida it's much more complicated to find that out then we've checked with the courts because of course if you've been convicted of a felony and you've not had your civil rights restored this is flagged in your file we also checked with the courts to see if somebody has lost their right to vote be cause of guardianship has been stated by a judge that this person has lost their right to vote we also are using the national change of address system of the postal service to check on address changes people move very very very often this past period in particular with the economy as it is young people of course but just kind of everybody so that's an another one of the systems that we use that we keep that we keep current on so there's a number of these systems that we use and if this registration gets through those then we want to keep it current one of the main tools we use is the national change of address because that's a place where we can automatically create an update if we use their systems merge them it appears that you move we will send you a postcard this says as a service to you we've updated your voter registration but if that's not what you wanted or if there's some change of that so that's one system but all of that information about changing actually has to go to the county level because in our system of elections the county owns a list the county chief election officer often called the county auditor but not everywhere is the only person our office can't make any changes on any voter list except there is a required federal purging if somebody has not voted for several cycles for over a four year period their registration is put into inactive and we are allowed to do that otherwise it is basically a no sent them electronically to a county election officials saying hey we think this address should be updated in this way can you please check that out and if that's true please take that action sounds very complicated  great system but i have a question from our audience if we do electronic voting how can you tell if this at the signature of the person who is voting when i do a credit card signing my signature doesn't look anything like it which has been authorized in eighteen states and the first one was arizona two thousand and two last october on line voter registration was implemented in minnesota without enabling legislation just a moment well that is that that's not a true statement so i don't know where that came from but this has resulted in a lawsuit in my group of republican lawmakers and two interest groups who call these lakshya illegal so the question is what is the status of and i go to register some well i would say one status is that many individuals including yourself for whomever wrote the question have seen part of the information but perhaps not the other part in the year two thousand the minnesota legislature mandated that all electronic signatures be excepted by the courts as equal to what we used to call what signatures required the courts to accept that and authorized all agency heads in state government to implement all transactions electronic as they chose to do so two thousand it passed unanimously we've implemented i think sixty four online tools in our office under that mandate and we find them great most of them are in business services a number of them are in elections this is just the on that we've done so it's a mischaracterization a it's not very helpful that kind of characterization but why would people want to keep paper voter registration and oppose electronic i can say that one reason that i've been told is that when you take a paper registration let's say you're at a bus stop you're at the state fair you're at the shopping mall somebody says if you change your name have you move which allowed to update your registration you fill it out and give it to them they can take that and they do take that and xerox it and your name your phone number your e mail your last four of your social or your driver's license is now in the possession of a candidate a political party or some company they have hired from las vegas in florida this is common practice it has been allowed to go on because the legislature created a loophole so having people say no we must have paper voter registrations the only serious argument that i see for that is that they want to continue harvesting the private personal information of people who turn in paper voter registration this is why arizona utah indiana brasco all the states who started and very quickly in impose new systems to get rid of the paper registration is because this harvesting of people's personal data is objectionable to almost anyone who thinks about it so when somebody says no we want paper it's probably because they want to harvest the personal information of people and we've got to stop that now the fact is it's extremely expensive the arizona experience and it's been ten years in arizona eighty three cents on a paper three cents on electronics eighty cents saving on six hundred thousand in a row on a same day ridge return a half a million dollars so somebody wants to spend another half a million dollars of local government money so they can keep harvesting the personal data off of people op a proposed registration list this is why all of these particular the western states utah and kansas nebraska they said are you kidding me and the corruption that goes on with this have these companies from florida and nevada taking these voter registration forms and taken that information and turning it into fund raising appeals and all kinds of things this is this is the reason why other states have been very aggressive i think that arizona is something at about seventy five or eighty percent now of their voter registrations because they've had ten years or maybe eleven years now or electronic and of course when you have somebody entering their data at home behind the firewall they're protected people can't steal their data unless they're sophisticated and there are some sophisticated people stealing our data for sure but more importantly they're typically putting in the proper spelling the proper address and again we'll go back to how do you keep a list cleaned up heidi and note that someone has been convicted of a felony if you know anderson with a no or anderson with a knee i mean these kinds of things that come when you have accurate voter towards more online transactions authorized in two thousand was a nudge by the legislature to agencies of all kind of get go and get busy clean up these lists make transactions things people can do at home and when it comes to our office office of secretary of state we've taken this seriously and we have over sixty of our transactions now online and people love them people write us love about how great these are people see me on the street and say i don't know what they're talking about at the legislature but we use your system and so for us it's clear that the legislature's decision in two thousand which was to say get and you decide when where and how but get going is the preferable way for the legislature to nudge but when the legislature says you have this system by this date and we'll give you a third of the money you need and so on and so forth then it is a recipe for the kind of disasters that we've been seeing in the newspapers so our office takes this business of creating something online very seriously it has to be tested and retested and we hire outside people who try to hack it i mean you know we're not carrying people's heavy data but we are important sources of data and we protected and we've been prepped protecting it for thirty years but folks who want to keep paper voter registration so that somebody can harvest the personal data i want to know one i have a kind of a question from the audience with the on line registration will the on line registrations make more work for election workers so online voter registration in the states that we have seen so there's twenty some states now and you know they're they're largely western but they're not only western like indiana  georgia but in places where there is you know that when our election workers think about the work they have to do online voter registration will give you a cleaner list so that's one big plus but it also will reduce the number of election day registrations because when somebody is you know let's say they've moved or their name is change or something in the thinking oh i'm just going to change it down when i vote is a different decision then oh i can go online i can see where my polling place is i can see where my sample ballot is and all of back and i can double check my registration and see if it's current and if not i can click a button and i can find out and change it so my impression is that if we follow the pattern that we've seen in the other states there will be a reduction in election day registration which is a really really good thing it's just a big job we have to have special judges you stand in line and when we talk about the winds of course we're talking about lines to vote but more importantly in some instances the winds to do the registration now for folks who just moved just turned eighteen just come to our state they need election a rejection that's how we do things and in a way that's why we're actually registration is so important but for the folks who just moved and they can just fix it online and just walk right in that's what we should you know that's what we should be doing so i think anything that makes the system cleaner and more accurate you know that's just can be better but mostly it's going to save money to taxpayers and local governments because that's where the big cost are eighty three cents versus three cents the six hundred thousand i mentioned you know some some years you know it'll be a million total just because the number of people moving and young people in that kind of thing so we're having significant potential savings those savings all accrue to the county government and so when the decisions are made at the state level and they don't they're not thinking about somebody else's money it might take a little bit of nudging to get themselves you know that's a savings for the county government or the city government let's make sure that happens is a question from the audience what is the status of the online comment ever on most of it's ok let's move on to the next question which is on overcoming barriers to voting and improving voter turnout the largest group of citizens who are not eligible to vote in minnesota are those who have been convicted of a felony and have not completed their sentence so do you favor restoration of voting rights for felons who are on probation or parole why or why not well i'm not sure that is largest group of people who are disenfranchised but anyhow it's a very important subject because it's clear change in the way that people feel incorporated into the community and the lot of explanation about why the north dakota system is an excellent system their system is if you're in prison which is prison is where you are sent on some circumstances and felonies you cannot vote and if you're out of prison you can't the advantages are obvious in one level it's a very clean system and it means that an election judge doesn't have to do a lot of this and that and this and that it's also for the individual it's a very clean system i'm in and out that sort of thing but it has that advantage of what the scientific research says to us which is when somebody is out you want them getting reengage and reinvolved in in this system and  i haven't really thought about this much but on the election day two thousand and eight a young man who had gone to prison at a young age had a young girlfriend was  his picture was blasted all over the state because on election day of two thousand and eight he had called his probation officer and had left him on fortunately a message that said know john you know so he went over and voted and his probation officer got the message and called him a said no don't go you can't vote that's another felony you'll go back to prison and the young man freaked out he said what do you mean go back to prison i wasn't trying to do anything wrong i was trying to be a good citizen and and of course it was a mess it was blasted all over the state you know his whole story with the young girl from everything i mean it you know and for the county it was a whole bunch of money they had to have you know hire investigators they had to put this whole thing and then they eventually reduce the charges a gross misdemeanor so it was not another felony and they may have thirty days and work out so his whole life  turned upside down and shaken beyond believe because he had not been told and this became clear he had not been told in the judge was furious about this the judge said publicly the legislature must make sure these young people know that there's a message the legislature passed overwhelming bipartisan support a bill requiring judges to inform him for the corrections officials to inform and that bill vetoed and then the next year when it came to the committee the committee chairman would not hear the bill and in this last session when it came to the conference committee it stopped so when people have a solution to our current problem our current situation that would make a difference and it's vetoed or block it makes me worry that there's a desire to have big headlines and people in trouble this young man this strong mccain coleman supporter stories blasted over the paper implied t some people that there were big problems in our voting system and then that was used to justify other kinds of measures so when a solution to the problem of not informing these young people that they've lost or read well they can't vote until it's restored the towed block refused it makes me nervous that we're not going to ever get to a real solution because there is a desire to keep the problem so that the problem can be used in excuse for some other mechanisms for vote suppression in some other way so i'm hopeful that this north dakota system that's what we often call that there be more conversation about it because frankly  even the cost of the county for the camera in all this process and procedures we have other things that we need to be doing and when we look at other states they're moving in the direction of acknowledging the scientific research and saying hey we need to get these people reintegrate into society not continue this minnesota has a reputation for not incarcerating a lot of people but using the for their long probation sentencing very very long probation periods and that creates an even more difficult situation because there's almost no connection between probation officials and community corrections and individual over time so we actually in a way a kind of more complicated problem and we need to be finding a solution i don't hear much discussion about right at the moment but it does come up thank you let's move on to the topic of early voting presently minnesota does not allow early early voting where a voter can go to an election office and vote a ballot just like they would at a poll site but thirty two states do allow for early voting so what are the main arguments for and against implementing early voting in minnesota so we have a early voting in minnesota forty six days before the election you can go into your city clerk's office or you can get your absentee ballot in vote so it's not true that we don't have early voting we don't have early processing that means the county clerks in the city clerks have got to spend a lot of time and money for and around with all the paperwork so we have a really voting we don't have a really processing why don't we have early processing i can't speak for that i have no idea but we have a really voting and people make use of it you go to clay county forty six days before those r b s are lined up their turn on their go when they vote they're off to florida we have a good early voting systems in minnesota and people make use of them next year this year that we're in now about the middle of the year when we get past the possibility of any special election we'll also have no excuse absentee voting for everybody and we'll have the ability to order those online and if we follow the pattern of other states people will say you know i can have my ballot and i can use the internet in research these judges and these soil and water district things on these matters and we're going to see an increase in early voting and voting by mail on a steady and probably a relatively rapid rate of speed people want early voting people have been using early voting so will we get early processing of the boat so that our county and city i don't know we have early voting and we make the results public after the close of the election ok so with the implementation of on line voter registration is no excuse absentee voting minnesota has taken steps to modernize our election system and also make voting work cesspools of the public what other methods could we use to modernize our system and also increase fotr participation i think they're probably two different questions increasing participation typically you know in our best years there's a million people not voting that's in the best years so we're the best voting state in the nation and in our best years  young man is registered for the draft of eighteen perhaps someday every young woman will also be it's an automatic system it can just be converted into a voter registration like that would increase turnout possibly if people are on the list and the candidates are out knocking on doors and sending literature and calling it you know that that's the sort of thing but that's a marrying of getting people on a list and candidate expenditure candidate participation other organizations too but but let's be frank it's the big spending campaigns that sort of drive some of these issues i personally think that there's other things that we can do to modernize our system that help us be kind of able to more easily follow when somebody moves like when somebody goes to another state there are more things that we could do to let the other state know that i'm eligible voter in our state has moved to that state and so nine or ten states ever new system they call it erick and i don't know what the letters stand for but we are looking at participating that has a lot of sort of cost referencing across you know to kind of clean up the system however the three things that we notice that have to do with the actual voter turnout because when we are at seventy five percent seventy six percent in a good year there are some parts of the state that are ninety some percent so there must be some part of the state's at the sixty percent so an average is great i'm very happy that we're the top voting see the nation but i'm aware that that's a disparity of a certain kind some is the necessity especially of young people to just give them information about our system or people who've moved here people have so many different experiences around the country or wherever they're from that so they're just an information thing league of women voters is very very active in letting people know and that includes being at immigrant naturalization ceremonies and greeting people in the community so that's one thing but there's really a say can thing that's related but different and that's actually welcoming people young people in particular or shy now this may not feel like it around the house but the notion of doing something you haven't done or maybe looking foolish or maybe not knowing or wherever says this is a serious matter and of course we don't stay number one and voting if our young people don't vote i mean you know i mean it's that we will all be voting and then it will die and  then we'll be you know like the other you know hawaii or something but i know from many of the sources of helping young people use the machines that when they do it and they stick it in him they go to their friends high school isn't the beginning and end of this but we do need ways to well come people that also means getting more young people in the polling place as poll worker trainees and those poll workers if young people go in  well you know we're all kind of you know but you know so that's the thing but the third part is a portion of our neighbors perhaps some of us in the room have had an experience some like that says i don't need to vote on a to vote why waste my time voting and it can be one vote doesn't matter or something a but it also can be oh i worked hard for so and so when then they compromised or they sold out or i was disappointed or you know something is in the heart and we began asking the question in public forums you know like i was up at red lake which is up near the canadian border red lake indian reservation cut fairly isolated area and i asked the audience it was a big public forum and i asked the audience hey you guys are voting in the ninety percent range up here you know that's very good at you know how do you do it can i share that with other people and you got dead silence and of course you don't like science you know with the goes on for hours it seems like but probably five or ten seconds after the dead silence a young woman stood up in the back and she pointed at me and she said when you drove in tonight to red lake to the town hall that you drove by the big giant v f w hall veteran former warsaw she said the inside of that hall is alarmed long list of all the braves that given their lives for this country and she pointed to the ground she said we love this beautiful place we're very patriotic and we vote and she silently sat down in the whole room nodded just like this and that was kind of the so i took that in i thought it will bow bats an explanation for them like why did they vote in ninety of ninety two percent ninety three percent and very soon after that i was in herman town which you know maybe you know it's up near duluth a matter road relaunches round table rubber chicken the whole thing i'm sitting next to the president of the chamber who's a publisher and i say hey you know you guys appear you vote in the ninety percent range very unusual no city is like the luke they vote in the ninety percent range in the nation  and he didn't blink he looked to me and he said we're very patriotic and we take care of the things that we love and that includes voting just like that and i realized that this president of the chamber at the rotary and this young native american woman had said more or less the same thing which is we love this place but we're not the kind of people to say oh we love america we love minnesota we love something we take care of it and taking care of this place that we love includes voting so if those sorts of values we can continue to reinforce those values then the hardening of the heart that takes place when you're disappointed politically or something like that if you can be reminded of something that connects you to that this can help overcome some of that cynicism and it's one of the reason we developed our vote in our veteran program because we're able to say and you know when i'm at the state fair there's a thousand people in our gone by and now i don't vote  on you know but if you get them say oh what about a vote on a veteran program you get them talking about their great great great grandfather in the civil war or their dad who is in the second reward their daughter who's in kuwait and pretty soon you can get them into a conversation about something bigger and there's a possibility of connecting to a value that says well you really love this you know well we got to take care of it yeah you know well you got to get on the boat and i had this great experience where a woman came by in one of those little motorized carts and ice and i kind of so what she said a few years ago i didn't vote and my brother in law and i hate my brother in law he said if you don't vote you can't bitch i hated it but he was right and not but i voted ever since and in the end so i kind of feel like in our society if we transmit the notion that if we care about something we take care of it we don't just  then taking care of it has to include a number of things being active in the community contributing whether it's a church or wherever it might be whatever you're doing and voting has to be part of taking care of something we love we can transmit those values you know where it's seventy five percent can we push it up to eighty we're at eighty percent can we push it up from that but mostly we're in a conversation with each other about taking care of this place voting is one thing there's lots of other things to do thank you let's talk about same day registration the league of women voters in minnesota would like to improve election day registration in a manner that is reasonable and that we would that we feel is definitely needed do you support allowing additional documents to prove identity and address yes and we've proposed new rules and regulations that are up to that are under consideration i also am in favor of reducing dramatically election day registration if you move in stand in line at the post office and turn in your forms you shouldn't have to stand in line again this should be automatically updated if we can you know if we had a way to send a notice out to saying hey take a minute check your registration if it's not up to date but we'll go fix it i think there's lots of things that we can do to dramatically reduce election day registration which will reduce lines it will speed things up people's experience will be better local election officials will help us more to do afterwards and said routes are separate and whether this is good or not depends on your point of view candidates will have cleaner more complete more accurate lists to work from so less of those wasted calls and you know more opportunity to get legitimately important literature out to people like to know about how many people who register on same day are deemed in eligible  later this is a question from the audience who said in two thousand and eight but ten percent of the minnesota population registered on election day with about ten percent actually nine point six percent could not be confirmed as eligible do you know what the numbers truly are for who does not who is not eligible who actually does register at election day well that would be a county sink a national county but it's a really tiny number so it's not significant well i don't know what significant is like for example how many people have died after they've dropped off their balance and then what's that situation and it's complicated if somebody has died and so you have a lot you have a lot a little weirdnesses in elections and you do the best you can but often it takes five or six months for people to do their typing for all their simply registration different you know connections on this is because we have a lot of things that we have to do to verify people so i think there's a kind of underlying thing which is oh you know there were billboards and so the number one and election fraud in the nation that's attempt to create an impression to then create support for vote suppression to keep some people from voting but it certainly doesn't reflect who we are as a state so wait a minute here and trash talking the state like people will come in and say oh we're the worst in the nation for small business you know and they'll show me an article that says we minnesota created only six thousand new businesses and registered businesses everest and sixty something thousand you know so i beg where does this information come from to trash talk about our state and what can we do to try to straighten out the record well of somebody said intention is something else they paint a picture here to accomplish something over here it's a coach the strip club owner registered almost one hundred people at the strip club to try to get the city council overturned he got caught our first governor's election if you were in the half breed as they said in the law in the constitution and you wore pants you could vote and so the candidate that had a pair of pants and handed it down and people then one round up stole the very first election in the state of minnesota election fraud happens occurred in our state so it happens it's something we're always always always paying attention to but it's become something of a excuse for trying to keep i think the proposal that was on the constitutional amendment thing would have kept about nine hundred thousand people from either voting or made it really hard to vote so i think the real issue is why are those million people not voting that million people in the highest voting state in the nation in our best year in a little tiny state a million people didn't vote that's a question it's a democracy challenge that's a crisis in our democracy and we're at the top of the path those are some issues there that i think really need some some some pretty serious work that young man up and warroad that mccain common supporter who wasn't told he couldn't from the audience as the secretary of state do you have the duty and authority to investigate voter eligibility we run test duty  authority we have a strong desire for the cleanest list possible and we have to get out of forty to run those different tasks so you know to use the change of address form or department public safety or the chords and so we have a good kind of authorization so those who have come through law and then through rules move on to rank choice voting which has been used in the city of minneapolis since two thousand and nine as you know the results of the november city elections took days to be determined so what are the pros and cons of rape choice voting and what do you think is the future of is well i don't really it's not for me to talk about the pros and cons of ranchos voting i ran a couple recounts we didn't get an outcome of a senate race for mine monson so much i mean i just think it's silly that this sport conversation i have to say for me personally i love walking into my polling place and not having to pick one you know for me it fits my personality i have the been able to rank my people off i love it so that's me and that's in my greek church where i vote so i'm really not here to you know kind of review it it's not it's up to it's a local government choice and local governments have different procedures by the way in which it g fast voters this november will elect a senator all of our u s representatives as well governor and all the constitutional offices historically voter turnout is left in a not presidential year how can we use that well there's the big factors which is in senate races and in presidential races a lot of money gets spent working and alerting senate i mean those are the lowest years by far and then you have the high years the president senator cetera this one will be a little bit in the middle there are no state senate races but there are house races everywhere there is a senate race so there is the one of the big spending races and there's a governor's race it's a big spending race but it's important i mean it's in the newspapers and so you know so this want to be kind of medium low but not low low but certainly not want so the bottom line question is the one that i have tried to ask informs around the state is what are the big because i really stopped operating in my life on average is we have a great school system we have great infrastructure we have great health care but we have a bridge go down some people don't have any health care in our schools they can be better right so when i think that we have high where the highest voting state in the nation this year last year next year whatever it's an average and some people vote in the ninety percent and that's good that's what we want and some people vote and sixty's that's a big disparity so how do we tackle that disparity some of the information can come from seeing what it is in the areas that are in the ninety percent what's you know what's what's in that cultural one other thing and then some of it is looking at the real barriers of my own experience is that the society itself has quite a few barriers for younger people so for example if you're younger you're more likely to be in the military and in the military there are a lot of barrier vote all kinds if you're younger you're perhaps less likely to have your own transportation and so getting the bus and doing certain things at certain times of of the day is a is a difficult problem or you're moving and so literature and door knocking things isn't keeping up with you as much or if you're working two or three jobs and you are just really stretch or you haven't built the thing so i sort of feel like there is one element of this which is examining the extra barriers to people who do want to be active and then what can we do about the barriers the the two the two groups that have have in my experience the greatest difficulty people in the military and people with disabilities by far this is the most of a cold and in both instances there are actual barriers in some cases real barriers but tackling those low voting parts of our population we have a disability task force one of the the things bring up every time is that transportation is a really big issue and so trying to figure out some of these other question states that have gone to no excuse absentee states ha gone to some other systems that encourage mail balloting have in side of those systems some things that help with a few of those but i kind of you know mike mcconnell personal philosophy is that we need to tackle every single situation in for instance you know communicating to parents and to people in churches hey elections coming up in november is one of your kids or a neighbor or friend or coworker are they out of the country are they on a missionary vision trip or are they in school someplace so they're traveling within the military service and oh you know they need to be getting their all their things in order and so it's sort of encouraging all of us to be thinking that we're ambassadors for voting and thinking about those in our circles our church or home or whatever circles and then saying hey are you registered you know you might not be here on that day are you registered there or you know so there's a kind of a thought process that makes everybody because if we're voting in the fifty to seventy five percent range you know  and the higher that means that if each of us is thinking consciously about that one other person in our lives who might not mean for whatever reason and we reach out to them then we have we have some  mechanisms for raising it up i had a year i thought we could get up to eighty and we got up to seventy six percent and i felt great we were six percent ahead of wisconsin who says second state but you know we don't need to talk about some questions in the audience what did you visit position on voter id and you agree or disagree with the idea that alienates minorities and older voters please explain oh i don't know if it alienates people but many older people could never get a government issued photo id and in our state this is a recurrent annual problem but i think that the problem is the million people not voting and this would add to the number of people who could not vote so it's not something that i support if you take his word for it and to subtract one not of course you know so you have situations where things happen and really nothing can be done but this is not you know not a kind of problem that is that it's a problem that's put on a billboard that says well it's all bunch of voting fraud and about here and so when things happen that are in the i'm not anomaly situation of human beings like the young man who wasn't told he couldn't vote and voted you know if there's not a specific thing that can be done about it but you do everything you can and in that instance the judge said hey legislature pass a law required that these young people are told process so for example one a judge has this list of ten things that they're signing you can't have contact with the person you attacked or you beat up or whatever you can't have a gun the other day there would be on the list you can't vote so you got to put it on the list so some counties ramsey county has been very good about trying to find people and to inform them because it costs them eight ton of money to screw around with this which is why north dakota laughs at us you know they say what are you guys doing over there is wasting all that money so ramsey county did a very good effort i think but putting it into law that these notifications are necessary also then gives you the proof that you need like if you have this in a list on a form so you get a pass a water will form and then it's signed then that's evidence in court that makes it very easy to then get a prosecution so there's reasons why the judge said to the legislature passes long there's a reason why it got broad support and there's a reason why our task force recommended  you know i'm hopeful that someday it will someday it will happen but you know i'm not here to speak for the correction system or the peoples of the magician's of no i don't work for them i just need them to let people know especially young people that you can't vote that kind of thing you can there's implementation costs i just set it up yeah i think the programming was about thirty thousand dollars and there been five thousand people or so used it so you know the savings of a half a million three thirty thousand dollars bozeman not bad it's come from your budget and federal money there's federal money on their state money yeah the savings go to the counties that's what's great you know i mean that's the thing you know people say oh it costs it does go bubba well who does it cost and who gets the savings and the savings in this case go to the cities and counties and that's a really good thing say something i think there's been great progress in the past decade i think but especially in the past five or six years in getting more standardization in how election judges are trained in how the poll workers are trained and you know so the current rules that are under consideration right now do expanded sort of make for the national lists but most military d s now are pretty standard eyes and i mean i haven't i haven't heard much you know i haven't heard much in judges saying oh we can't tell on military but when you're trying to make a decision and you're in the military about where will you be and do you want to be voting by fort bragg because you're going to be assigned there and you want to be voting back in stillwater cause that's where you're from and you're going back to and you know you have to make a bunch of decisions and once you make those decisions then you have to act on them and sometimes as you act on them the rules are different in north carolina than they are here and so i do know that people get caught or i had a truck driver call me on election  driven to chicago to load he expected a back hall in the back hall wasn't ready and he didn't want to drive back empty because it was bad economic times it was hard enough but he also didn't want to not vote in so it was a very bad situation was there a mechanism where we could have helped work this out actually if you had been across the border in another country there are different rules for overseas voters right but but in this case you had to drive back with a load in this was an economic burden so there are the there are just things that happen in the course of elections in all whether it's somebody dying or you know whatever they're just things that happen in lives and you do your best and i swear the thirty thousand people who volunteer each time and many of you here are in that category to be our elections are poll workers are saints and are hardworking devoted public servants and those thirty thousand people half republican half democrat really do make our system work and they have to confront all kinds of things in the course of the day and as we age and as more of our babies who are born with down syndrome and on the  spectrum become eighteen it will be more challenging for our election judges to be put in positions of having to make decisions that seem in some ways kind of arbitrary and i dick that we will have work to do  trying to make sure that we continue to make and make sure that our election judges feel empowered and also clear about the rules and about what's going on and they are going to come to new to be human beings and we have to understand that you've got to take that take that into consideration are is a question about a specific statute why wasn't minnesota statute two zero one point zero six one passed through the legislature to allow the great idea of online registration i don't know go online which is one of the reasons why those those forms in every public building every post staff service and in all the you know driver's license places and everything everybody exam but they're on line on our flying on a but in a bunch of different languages and who knows the particular instance but we could print them out tonight but you can also just go register online which is means that you don't have to turn over your private da somebody and they don't have to read your handwriting second part of the same question why are you collecting email the confidential confidentiality notice doesn't have treatment of email policy is this and this is his third question concert the confidential confidentiality notice says that law enforcement has access to the records of the secretary of state why i don't know you know how they use them that those six have come out of the legislature that i don't know why the legislature did that so you could ask the legislature they could tell you and you ok this is the last question i have so many of you have any other ones start writing is it the role of government to encourage greater voter turnout if yes wouldn't you consider problem that government raises and collects taxes and spend some to change people's beliefs that is propaganda can't read the next sentence and the mike died so why should i do a check i ought to speak up  you it's in minnesota statute one of the assignments to my office is encouraging not just for registration but voter participation so long requires me to do that i'm especially interested in keeping minnesota number one because it makes me proud so i work hard at it to have any other questions in the audience would it be a good idea to make voting a weekend activity rather than a work day on tuesday the weekend before vote the weekend before that vote the weekend before that both the weekend before that vote that we could before that or both the weekend before that in forty six days you have many weekends if you would like to vote on the weekend i like tuesdays but it's a personal preference but i like forty six days because my life's busy and most people's lives are busy and so having bad option is a good option all right here's a question from a league member obviously how can the league of women voters voters pre registered voters without paper registration forms there's lots of paper education forms will keep  so that if you wanted to bring around i pads and i mean there are lots of ways to register so those states who have online voter registration for over a decade like arizona and utah bush so they get they have all kinds of systems that they use and so you know it's interesting to see which comes up with the cheapest way to do it i'm guessing that the legal world voters other league of women voters legal country and you know that those kind of organizations that are out there are looking at what's the most effective way but if you're in the back room and naturalization ceremony and people are you know there's young men there and young women in uniform the minute they're done with that they're on a plane and they're to call way to what you know they're in a hurry because they're in the military and they've got to go someplace and want to do it as fast as you can and you know so you try to think through well what's my situation and what's the best way to do it are you are you required to file administer the statutes to ensure voter integrity if so why do you violate the statute to zero one point zero six one that's come up again and use executive authority to implement registration two thousand the legislature said you guys get every transaction that you can on mine and we've done sixty some of those sixty four  primary and people in the military could get their ballots turned around right because you know you'd have a primary and then if there was any kind of recount or whatever and then you could get the ballot so we passed the bill move in the day that the primary got vetoed like what are you thinking and finally the federal government passed a law saying it must be him and the federal government actually said forty five days which put us saturday so we said forty six days but we also passed a law that said that your son in anyone in the military and those overseas can also receive it electronically so like by fax or by facsimile or by an e mail but it has to be printed in and mailed back so now we have forty six days and you can get it essentially instantaneously you know if he's got a printer and a computer and so he has nearly twice the amount of time as he had before and the ballot can come basically like that but if you happen to be home forty six days you know home for you know holidays are home for the state fair or whatever like that that's in that forty six day depending on what day they're home and stuff but forty six days is now the requirement for mailing out or distributing making available absentee ballots and it's because it's what was necessary for our soldiers and others serving in the military to be able to get their ballot in and get it back again that's why we i think our completion rate last election was ninety nine point one percent so we're darn close not withstanding bad odds last you know shows up in a plastic bag with a yellow thing on it but autumn with electronic delivery and with forty six days you know we're pretty good we need to reach out to people who were disappointed in the past because it didn't work for them and let them know that there's a new system they can get it fast and they have forty six days and so our offices been trying as been focusing on reaching out to people who we know were frustrate their right as horrible letters i tried to vote and it was too late and we say hey you know the l you know not the military well we're like here's an odd thing so there are some ships that they're so weight sensitive they don't allow him to bring paper to print on well people had we hadn't thought through vast problem there's something called a submarine ballot because when the submarines would go down then you could basically just write in the party or the purse name or something like that in that ballot we still call a submarine ballot try to create a kind of flexibility for people who were in the maybe and who were really out of touch for a long for a long period of time i think there's always somebody in a forward base in afghanistan someplace where they really are it's really it and the mail drop didn't come you know because they have to mail it back in oh they're a little things but it is so much better than before and we get fabulous letters from people said you know i tried to vietnam  obama and but last time i tried it it worked and you know so we know that this and this new system the congress passed forty five days we made it forty six the pentagon suggested ninety days which minutes a long time but forty five is looks like it has worked out pretty well so so for right now i feel like our work is reaching out to disappointed people from before to get them to try again and your son serving him in paperwork and cost the city about eight times more than in person ya been arguing for early process saying i'm happy we have early voting but i really think early processing would save us some money walk in fill in your get in the box you're done men have is just the least expensive in a way kind of the best the best system you don't have anyone opening or any possibility one of the other states do this and they have for a long time and it  seems to be very good system i put of the real focus on trying to oppose unfunded mandates and also trying to find out where there are cost savings and so electronic poll books could bring us some cost savings in some places early processing or having people stick them right in can achieve us cost savings and those savings accrue to the local property tax payers and so i think could be a good thing we'll see what the legislature wants to do this will be the last question you've said that you're not going to seek another term as secretary of state so what are your plans for the future spend more time with my family decide if i want to go back and be a history teacher again or not pay attention a little bit more to the things that have power of upon my desk over the last eight or nine years and see what is in there  read a few books and magazine articles appear so you must read this but i have a lot to do in this year we have big elections we have you know where business climate is up and we register business as you know elections is the smallest of the things that we do in our office of business services the biggest by far so i feel like of the receiver busy and some young courageous person i'll take my place and i'll get to hand off the baton and hopefully have everything in good order and there are some things that i'm able to do because i'm not running that are good to do in terms of putting office in good shape and and then i'm you know old enough to not have to do anything i don't want to do and i'm young enough to do things that i didn't want to do and so i want to take advantage of that but i but you know i spent my life working on agriculture and family farm issues and i'm sure i'll go back to making sure i'm paying attention to the strength of our rural economy as well so well so we'll see but i'm going to another year and i got a lot of work to do i thank you so much for being here this evening and for answering our questions i also like to thank the city of t and dot org website it will have the list of rebroadcast states and i'm behalf of the league of women voters thank you again thank you very much it was wonderful to me