Barely two weeks after an unusual law went into effect delaying a race for Congress in Minnesota until February 9, the U.S. Representative who is affected has gone to court seeking to argue that the law is invalid because it runs afoul of federal law.
Freshman Democratic Rep. Angie Craig has hired Marc Elias for her legal team, Democratic “superlawyer” in the Bush-Gore election dispute of 2000 and that involving Democrat Al Franken and Republican Norm Coleman for the Minnesota Senate seat in 2008.
Because of the recent death of U.S. House nominee Adam Weeks of the Legal Marijuana Now Party, a 2013 law went into effect that requires the election to be pushed three months if a major party candidate dies within 79 days of election.
Since the Legal Marijuana Now Party drew 5 per cent of the vote in the previous statewide election, it is recognized as a major party in Minnesota, hence the delay — even though ballots have been printed up for November with the names of Weeks and the other party nominees.
Operatives in both parties generally agree that the extended campaign time will allow Republican Tyler Kistner more time to raise money. A recent Harper Polling survey showed Craig leading Kistner by 45-to-36 percent.
The genesis of the “delay and vote” law was the death in a plane crash of Democrat Sen. Paul Wellstone eleven days before the 2002 election. Under the law at the time, former Vice President and 1984 Democrat presidential nominee Walter Mondale replaced Wellstone as the Democrat Senate nominee. He went on to lose to Republican Norm Coleman, who had been campaigning all along against Wellstone.
“Democrats wanted this law because their push for an extended voting season rather than a traditional Election Day does not work if the candidates do not remain fixed throughout the voting season,” veteran Gopher State conservative activist John Augustine told Newsmax. “If the 2002 election had been run the way elections are being run today, hundreds of thousands of already-cast votes for Wellstone would effectively have caused the Dems to write off that election as unwinnable once Wellstone passed.”