(C) Minnesota Reformer
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House passes major elections bill over Republican objections that it’s not bipartisan [1]
['Deena Winter', 'More From Author', '- April']
Date: 2023-04-13
The Minnesota House passed a bill by a 70-57 vote late Thursday that protects the right to vote and makes it harder to run political advertisements without saying who paid for them.
The Democracy for the People Act (HF3) includes automatic voter registration, allows 16- and 17-year-olds to pre-register to vote and allows voters to choose to vote by mail permanently by getting on a permanent absentee ballot list.
A similar bill is still working its way through the Senate (SF3).
Rep. Emma Greenman, DFL-Minneapolis, a national voting rights attorney and chief author of the bill, said the nation has seen democracy tested in the past three years and needs to protect voting rights.
Rep. Harry Niska, R-Ramsey, said a better title for the bill would be “Democrats Rule the People Act.” Some Republicans said if the bill becomes a law, it will face a legal challenge.
“This is about the worst elections bill I can imagine,” said Rep. Anne Neu Brindley, R-North Branch. She contrasted the DFL bill with recent bipartisan election bills. Former DFL Gov. Mark Dayton, for instance, insisted all election bills should be bipartisan, though that was a few years before former President Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election.
Republicans spent a good deal of floor debate talking about how the bill would allow two teenagers charged with killing a 23-year-old Brooklyn Park woman to pre-register to vote (it would only apply to one of them). That led to an extended back-and-forth with House Majority Leader Jamie Long, who repeatedly said Brindley and others were violating House rules by referring to Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty and her charging decision.
Rep. Cedrick Frazier, DFL-New Hope, said lawmakers should encourage young people to vote, rather than put up barriers.
Republicans unsuccessfully tried to amend a portion of the bill that requires more reporting of political ads to the state campaign finance board. Current law requires reporting for ads that “expressly advocate” for a candidate — by using any of about a dozen words like elect, support, defeat, stop. The bill expands the definition to include verbiage that is the “functional equivalent” of express advocacy, employing the same standard used for nearly two decades by the Federal Election Commission. That standard, Greenman said, has been “litigated up and down.”
“Voters have a right to know who is spending money in our elections,” she said.
Brindley suggested the provision could require newspapers and voter guide publishers to report endorsements of candidates.
Republicans unsuccessfully tried to cut a provision banning political spending in elections by “foreign-influenced” corporations, which is when a foreign group owns at least 1% of a corporation. Wealthy foreign entities like the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia are already banned from directly spending money in Minnesota and federal elections.
Brindley said this is a “model bill” by the progressive Center for American Progress, which itself takes money from foreign donors. Greenman said “that’s news to me” since she spent hundreds of hours working on the bill.
The bill also includes a provision that would make it a gross misdemeanor — punishable by up to a year in jail and a $3,000 fine — to knowingly spread materially false information with the intent to impede or prevent people from voting. That provision will likely face a legal challenge, according to a local lawyer who anticipates filing suit.
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[1] Url:
https://minnesotareformer.com/2023/04/13/house-poised-to-pass-major-elections-bill-over-republican-objections/
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