Editorial: Election bills fell to partisan 'gotcha'

Plenty of Minnesotans will follow today's oral arguments with considerable impatience and frustration. They'll wonder why several thousand of the last election's 290,000 absentee ballots landed in legal limbo. They'll ask whether a surer system could be devised to make absentee ballots less prone to administrative errors and legal second-guessing.

Several county elections officials on the receiving end of those questions answered them at a Humphrey Institute conference last week, with abundant frustration of their own. Yes, they said, we know how to improve absentee balloting to minimize this problem in the future. We worked persistently with both parties in the Legislature this year to get a reasonable remedy through the House and Senate. We want to move the processing of absentee ballots out of precincts and into county offices, to improve uniformity and relieve pressure on already busy election judges.

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