To-do over socialist vote drive is teapot tempest, 2 sides say
Dane Smith
Star Tribune
Published Oct 17, 2002
A conservative advocacy group has raised the specter of socialist activists from around the nation crossing the border into Minnesota to take advantage of Minnesota's liberal voting laws and helping reelect U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone.
But leaders of both the group crying foul and the socialist group accused of planning that effort described the controversy Wednesday as a tempest in a teapot.
"My tongue was placed firmly in my cheek," said David Strom, head of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota, a group funded largely by donors to conservative Republican candidates and causes. "There are so few socialists left that they could meet in a phone booth."
Frank Llewellyn, the national director of New York-city based Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), said his group's promotion of a voter-registration drive was misconstrued by the Taxpayers League and turned into a "new sophisticated form of red-baiting."
At issue is an alarm sounded earlier this week by the league, drawing attention to a Web site advisory by the DSA that described the reelection of Wellstone as its top priority.
"We are mobilizing to bring young people to Minnesota. Minnesota is one of the few states that allow same-day voter registration," the site said.
Those words implied that members of the group were being encouraged to come in and vote illegally, Strom said. His release called it "one of the most transparent attempts to steal an election since the Daley machine ran Chicago politics." But Strom left the next sentence in the advisory off his press release: "We will therefore focus our energy on registering young people."
Llewellyn said that his group hopes to send 10 or 20 people to the state late this month to help organize support for Wellstone and that none will actually try to vote. He said his group has about 8,000 members nationwide and about 100 in Minnesota.
Jim Farrell, a spokesman for the Wellstone campaign, said Wellstone didn't know anything about the group and does not approve of any attempts to register illegally.
Farrell said the league managed to fool talk-radio hosts into talking up the story on stations in the Twin Cities "without getting its facts straight."
The brouhaha also was the subject of an item on the Drudge Report Web site.
Strom said that "even if they themselves [the socialist group] are not plotting some grand voter fraud," the league only wanted to point out that the "laws that we have make it easy to commit fraud."
Minnesota, which always ranks high in voter turnout, generally is considered one of the easiest states in which to vote. Voters must reside in the state for at least 20 days before the election, a deadline that passed on the day the league issued its press release.
If not preregistered, qualified people can vote if they show proof of their residency at the polling place or have a registered voter from that precinct vouch for their residency.
-- Dane Smith is at rdsmith@startribune.com.