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Petersburg
Hello from the State Capitol,
We have entered the home stretch at the State Capitol, as the 2024 legislative session must end on May 20. Because of this, the House majority is in a rush to get their bills passed off the floor. For the past two weeks, we have basically been working until midnight, and only getting through a couple of bills during this time. Not surprisingly, most are controversial and not at all bipartisan.
*PARTISAN ELECTION BILLS JUST KEEP ON COMING*
Previously I discussed how elections bills are supposed to be bipartisan, but with one-party rule these proposals have been anything but.
Recently the majority approved bills that make it easier for people to vote illegally - such as allowing a person to describe where they live on a voter registration form rather than using an actual address – and allowing billionaires to spend money in Minnesota to influence our elections. Now it wants to implement ranked choice voting.
Under this idea, which would only apply to local races if the local government chose to implement the program, multiple candidates for a particular office appear on a ballot, and voters rank them in order of their preference. If no candidate receives more than half of the first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated and those who ranked them first instead have their vote go to their second choice. The process continues until one candidate achieves the required 50%.
The process is cumbersome, difficult and confuses many voters. If you make a mistake the possibility exists that your votes will be thrown out. It also slows down the process of counting the votes.
In the legislature, we should all agree that our elections system should make it easy for people to vote and difficult to cheat. Few of the elections provisions the majority approved this year met this goal.
*AMEND CONSTIUTION TO ALLOW ABORTIONS UNTIL MOMENT OF BIRTH?*
Speaking of voting, the House majority is ready to approve legislation that will ask voters to amend the state’s Constitution to allow abortions up to 40 weeks. To be clear, the language on the ballot won’t read anything like that, yet that is the reality of it.
The majority is attempting to codify abortion in our state’s constitution by burying it in equality language that has been around since the 1970’s. The ballot question would include a vague reference to "pregnancy.” That was done with intent. By being misleading and unclear, voters will be uninformed about the true implications of the amendment.
If approved by voters, the language that would be added to the constitution would enshrine the most extreme abortion policy in the nation – abortion up to the moment of birth, which is opposed by most Minnesotans.
People deserve to know what they’re voting on, and the way the ballot question is written is deceptive and does not tell the story of how expansive this new language would really be.
Talk to you soon,
John
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/RepJohnPetersburg
217 State Office Bldg.
100 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
St. Paul, MN 55155
651-296-5368
[email protected]
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