Fill To Capacity (Where Heart, Grit and Irreverent Humor Collide)
Podcast for people too stubborn to quit and too creative not to make a difference!Join visual artist Pat Benincasa in conversation with a riveting roster of guests to uncover extraordinary stories of everyday people. Listen as they share their quirky wisdom, unlikely adventures, and poignant life lessons! Fasten your emotional seatbelt for this journey of heart, humor and grit!
Fill To Capacity (Where Heart, Grit and Irreverent Humor Collide)
Heroes Behind Your Ballot, Who Are They?
Journey into the heart of democracy with Michelle Witte, Executive Director of the League of Women Voters of Minnesota, as she reveals how this powerful engine of civic engagement shapes our future. From its suffrage movement roots—championed by trailblazers like Nellie Griswold Francis and generations of African American women activists—to today's pressing challenges, discover how the League's mission extends beyond protecting votes.
Experience a masterclass in democracy preservation as Michelle unpacks critical issues: the Electoral College debate, redistricting battles, and combating voter misinformation. Drawing wisdom from icons like Susan B. Anthony and John Lewis, this episode illuminates how local initiatives and youth engagement create lasting change. Don't miss this inspiring exploration of how grassroots action and unwavering advocacy continue to strengthen our democratic foundation.
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Pat: Before we begin, listeners, This episode includes discussions of difficult historical events, including violence and injustice. We share this history with respectful sensitivity, just, so you know.
Pat: Fill To Capacity, where heart, grit and irreverent humor collide. A podcast for people too stubborn to quit and too creative not to make a difference.
Pat: Hi, I'm Pat Benincasa, and welcome back to Fill To Capacity. Today, Episode number 85, "Heroes Behind Your Ballot: Who are they?" We're just 12 days away from the most crucial election of our time. Today we're going behind the scenes to see the incredible work being done to make sure every single vote counts.
Pat: The League of Women Voters plays a key role in ensuring that your vote is protected. The League, along with their dedicated team of volunteers, has secured polling places, that are not only well prepared, but ready to welcome voters with open arms. Now, let me tell you something. I had no clue as to how much the League of Women Voters does beyond elections until I started researching for this podcast.
Pat: We've all heard about their amazing work at the polls, but that is just scratching the surface. I mean, they're tackling massive issues like climate change. They're right in the thick of legislative sessions pushing for real change. They're welcoming new citizens at naturalization ceremonies, and they're getting young people engaged in democracy early on.
Pat: Okay, listeners, it blew my mind. So, today, We're going to be diving into all of that, how they're not just making voting safe and easy, but how they're shaping the future of what civic engagement in ways that might surprise you. Okay, this is going to be one of those, whoa, I didn't know conversations.
Michelle: Thank you for welcoming me to your show.
Pat: Michelle Witte is the executive director of the League of Women Voters of Minnesota. She is a true advocate for democracy, leading an amazing team that's all about empowering voters and protecting our democratic process. So welcome, Michelle. So nice to have you here.
Michelle: It's great to be here.
Pat: Michelle, can you share your journey that led you to become the Executive Director of the League of Women Voters of Minnesota, and what drives your passion for the League's work?
Michelle: Well, thank you so much. And, uh, I think the title of your podcast is perfect, Fill To Capacity, which is how I feel right now in this election.
Michelle: We'll really see that by the end. But yeah, in short, I've been here for seven, a little like seven and a half years now. And my [00:03:00] journey, personally, certainly is well aligned with where we're at right now. I just turned 62 and I always say that because I'm always, you know, I, I think after COVID.
Michelle: You realize, Hey, I get to turn 62, I mean, it's happy, but I have that perspective of having been around a while and seen a few presidents come and go, but I actually started out my own journey in civic engagement at the University of Minnesota, when I went to support my first candidate for office.
Michelle: And then I learned about this was in the eighties, right. And I learned about the illegal war we were doing in Central America. And there's this little thing called apartheid, the arms race, you know, like we've been through a few things, and I got on buses and went to DC and protested and I got arrested at the CIA and, all kinds of things.
Michelle: So this sort of gets at the heart of it. I was also for me, it's been sort of a faith journey. I was the secretary of international concerns for the Lutheran student movement. And learn, just learned a lot about just how human beings are living around our world and how we can make it better for everybody.
Michelle: So, fast forward, did a lot of things in my life, but almost all in the nonprofit sector and very involved in politics and, which, you know, politics is local, including running for office. I ran, was very involved in my school district and our school board. Ran four different bond and levies for our school district, and then became an elected school board member for our South Washington County schools here for five years.
Michelle: So I've been on different sides of these different issues and questions and perspectives. It's great with the League of Women Voters. It's such a vibrant organization, but again, our history really is what a lot of people may not know. We're 104 years old. We began when Suffrage was achieved, right, in 1919, September 8th, Minnesota ratified the 19th Amendment.
Michelle: There's lots of things about our history that are so interesting. First of all, that, it took 72 years, really, for women to get the right to vote. And when you go all the way back to Seneca Falls and the first kind of call for enfranchisement with Frederick Douglass and, all these great people there.
Michelle: And so, a lot of times I'll go when I talk to schools, I'll like raise my hand and go, Hey, I'll say to students, Hey, how many of you would participate in a movement if you thought it was going to take 72 years to get done ? And I mean, no one thinks about that. Right. But that's what democracy asks of us.
Michelle: We are always lagging, right. We're always fighting for rights for people behind us because someone ahead of us for the rights we enjoy today. And so the suffragists were so insightful that when they got the vote, it was not for the privilege to vote, but for the justice they wanted to do in the world, which means you get involved.
Michelle: You are passionate about issues. It's very befitting, I think, for my own personal journey to be where I am and just thrilled with all of the great work that LEAGUE does around Minnesota and in all our communities, but across the country. Every state, including Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, has a League of Women Voters still today that are empowering voters and defending democracy, so it's very exciting.
Pat: Well, your story is amazing. That sense of community. I moved to Minnesota in the late 70s, from Michigan, and I was struck by a sense of community in Minnesota. It was quite progressive, and I was really taken aback by that. It is just part of the fiber of this state, and your story really brings home the fact that being a citizen
Pat: is not a spectator sport. I mean your life really embodies that now I'd like to talk about the fact that a lot of folks think of the League as primarily involved with elections, but the organization does so much more than that. Can you tell us about the broader mission of the League of Women Voters of Minnesota?
Pat: And how it goes beyond election management.
Michelle: Yeah, so a few things for sure is that we work in partnership with our election officials and county workers that really do the election management. We're behind this, we don't have any real official role there , I'll talk a little bit about the things we do to help get voters ready, right?
Michelle: We're really here for voters. And that civic engagement piece, I think, I just want to digress for one minute about your role. You talk about community and immigrants and one of the biggest things we've always done, and we've done almost exclusively here in Minnesota in the last 25 years, is we go to every single naturalization ceremony and register new citizens to vote.
Michelle: And almost 99 percent of them take the time after earning their citizenship to stop by and do that voter registration. And immigration, unfortunately gets people have all kinds of views of immigrants. Unless you were brought here illegally or you're Native American, we've all been immigrants.
Michelle: We all came here, and it is just really humbling to watch and see how excited people are to be here and how important they are to our communities and our society. But yeah, I think that when women got that right to vote, I want to tell just a quick story because this really hits it on the head for me.
Michelle: We really have a great suffrage history knowledge of African American women here in Minnesota. And Nellie Griswold Francis was a black woman in the Rondo area. who led the Every Woman's Suffrage Club.
Pat: By the way, listeners, the Rondo neighborhood was a thriving center of African American life in St. Paul, Minnesota,
Michelle: They worked alongside the white women's suffragists at the time to help bring this over the finish line. But they also did it right because of the justice they wanted to do. So our history shows that Nellie was probably the first woman after 1920 to actually lobby, go before the legislature. And she wrote and brought forward for passage successfully, the bill to ban lynching.
Michelle: This was after the four men. In Duluth, the circus workers who were horribly lynched, she brought forward a ban on lynching and it passed.
Pat:On June 1920 -In Duluth, Minnesota- 6 black men were accused of raping a white woman. 3 of those men: Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson & Isaac McGhie were dragged from jail by a mob- beaten and lynched. Medical evidence showed no rape had occurred.
Michelle: The idea is that we're involved in, whether it's big things like stopping lynching or small things like in school boundaries or, the things that affect you in your neighborhoods.
Michelle: The whole idea to get the vote is to be involved in our communities. And so, a lot of times today we hear some people saying, well, I'm not going to vote because the candidates they don't agree with me exactly. And I'm like, no, I'm really passionate about an issue and I don't see a candidate who's passionate.
Michelle: I'm like, well, you can't be that passionate about an issue if you're not going to vote. Because voting is the way our passion lives out, right? We vote for people who have the values and want to work on the issues we have. And so when you look at the first organizing convention then, so here's Nellie Griswold Francis out there right away in 1922 getting the anti-lynching bill passed.
Michelle: And the first meeting the League of Women Voters had, once the suffragists said, Okay, listen, we're going to shut down the suffrage organizations now after the 19th Amendment, and we're going to make the League of Women Voters to teach women, of course we're open to all genders now, at that point, to teach women how to be engaged in their communities, how to work with government.
Michelle: And they had civic schools all over the state and everything else. But their first program was amazing. We have the original copy of the program they did. Carrie Chapman Catt came to Minnesota, and they were working on social hygiene. Starting kindergarten, working on United Nations. These are all women who came up right through World War I and they were a powerhouse.
Michelle: They're like, we are here to study and understand issues and take action. And that's where the League still is. We all vote because we care about things. Of course, we're nonpartisan. We do not support nor oppose any candidate or political party.
Michelle: But issues are not partisan. We care deeply about issues, and we work together as members to study the issues, to get consensus on issues, and pass issues within our membership, as we have for the last hundred years, and then we can lobby at those at the Capitol. And we have made some really big differences in passing bills, including in the last 23 -24, where we worked with our partners to pass some of the most dramatically, wonderful bills to expand voting rights and access and election integrity that we've ever seen in Minnesota.
Pat: Whoa, that's amazing. You use the expression "social hygiene," what does that mean?
Michelle: Well, that was from 1919, right? So, this was their issue back then, remember that clean water, right?
Michelle: Access to just, you know, it's hard to remember. We've always had issues that somebody had to fight for that, for clean water, for sanitary working conditions. They were fighting for women to have no more than a 10-hour work day. If I have to make one big impact, I think when we are looking at democracy, you just gotta play with your history here.
Michelle: Because the history, you know, again, it's very easy, all of us to take, we just look around and everything we have, we just have, we have roads and running water and we have all these things. Well, those things did not come from nowhere, right? And I look at sports, it was so exciting to see the Minnesota Lynx, the women's basketball team going forward and being so amazing.
Michelle: Well, you know, Title IX was when I was in elementary school, right? I mean, without Title IX, women's sports, I mean, it just began the boom of women's sports. It's taken 40 years, 50 years to have the excitement that it has, but everything starts somewhere, right? And I think this is something we all have to just remember is, history is humbling because you realize how much has been done so that you can enjoy your life.
Michelle: And most of the time you will work on issues in your life and your community, your block, your school board, your country. That you will never see, you'll never see the end of it, but you do it anyway, people like Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott and, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, they were all long dead before the 19th amendment.
Michelle: I mean, for over a decade, but they fought for it nonetheless. And so I think we have to be a little more reverent to history. I think about people like John Lewis, who's my biggest fan. And he's so eloquent and I can never remember quotes well, but he basically look at this man who stood on the Edmund Pettus bridge and being attacked by dogs and billy clubs, and then to be a congressman.
Michelle: Imagine his perspective is, listen, this is the long game guys, you know, fought for it. So, I always say to people, they're like, well, I'm not going to vote. And I'm like, you need to put John Lewis on your bathroom mirror and remember them and the suffragists and all the people who opened this opportunity up to you and get out there and do it.
Michelle: I feel very strongly about remembering our history and also that in the world of Snapchat and, one minute, everything, democracy is not included in that. Because democracy will always require us to take action where we again may not get any feedback. We may not get any feedback we like, I mean, I was demonstrating back in the day,
Michelle: everybody I voted for after I was arrested. No one I voted for got elected and you get on the bus again, anyway. You keep going, right? And then, the perspective I can have now is 40 years later, after all that protest, all of those things changed. I mean, people actually went to prison for treason, you know, things changed.
Michelle: Apartheid fell down. The Berlin Wall came down. I mean, I don't think I'm personally responsible, but I know, and I can always rest and feel good that I was part of that movement. And so, I think that's, my message to young people, too. You all care about things and you just got to keep going.
Michelle: And that's what the League of Women Voters has done for 104 years.
Pat: You know, you're bringing up some really key points. One is democracy is messy. Number two is it's the long game. Now we live with instant information, instant news cycle, instant everything We know it right away and somehow that seems to have blurred into our discourse on politics that if you're voting for saying, yeah, but they don't feel that way So I’m not going to vote for him.
Pat: And so, we've become so specialized and hyper myopic per issue when democracy is a much bigger umbrella. It affects many communities, and it's amazing that the work you're talking about, and I thank you for that walk down that history lane. And looking at all the people before us that gave us these things that we don't even think twice about, an eight-hour workday, you know, the kind of benefits.
Pat: You're bringing up a really important point, and I noticed that the League is involved with communities. How does the League connect with communities through forums, town halls, and other initiatives to foster "informed", I'm going to say that word again, "informed" civic participation. What do you guys do?
Michelle: Great question. We used to be almost the only ones doing this work, right? Thankfully there's a lot more people doing this work that we partner with, and we're delighted, but that is our top product, right, is informing voters about everything from where to vote, when to vote, how to vote, but also the candidates.
Michelle: And on a nonpartisan basis, right? To really learn. So our candidate forums are still kind of the gold standard. We train all our moderators are question facilitators. We work really hard to not have gotcha questions, to be very fair to all the candidates. And we, our local leagues again, we have 35 around the state who are all doing candidate forums right now.
Michelle: We'll have several 100 forums have already been done or being done. They do a phenomenal job of educating voters on the issues. We also have our statewide voter guide, vote411. org. We used to have the paper printed guide, like Target used to fund it. It would be at the Target stores and in the papers.
Michelle: And of course, information is shifting. So now it's all online. But candidates can answer their own questions. We have all candidates down to like soil and water board, right? Like every candidate is on there so you can see who they are or how to get to them. If you don't know what's on your ballot. Of course, we also have a really phenomenal secretary of state in Minnesota.
Michelle: A lot of the information that we do, they also have, I mean, they have terrific. And we also tell people all the time about MNvotes. gov to find out about your polling place and all those things. So definitely crossover there. And that's the real word. You know, if I had to say like one of the posters, I'm looking at here in my office is it all comes of teaching girls to read, you know what I mean, education
Michelle: is that the heart of all of this? And I think that is true that we need to be informed voters. We need to learn what the candidates are, what they stand for, and not just from your own personal social media feed. Yes. And so, it's harder and harder though. It's an easy thing to say, get informed. But what sources do you use for your information?
Michelle: How do you know what to trust? How do you know what to believe? Those are getting to be tougher questions for people. And so we do a whole new set of information has been about how our elections work. Because as we know, certainly really after January 6th, when it was clear after the insurrection, which, you know, both parties have agreed on in, you know, we still have many people who don't, but as a rule, this has been a bipartisan understood activity, right?
Michelle: That people did not understand how elections work, how certification works. And then all of a sudden now, something people have trusted for a long time, people are not trusting our elections. So we've also started a whole new line of work around just educating people more about all the safeguards that are in place.
Michelle: We have a whole web page we started called Elections411 that tell you all the certification, how it works, all the safeguards. And we do a lot of public forums and. We do a lot of myth busting with letters to the editor and commentaries and shows like this, so education still at the heart of it, educating voters about the whole mix candidates when how to vote, but also now also about our elections and why we know they're fair and accurate.
Pat: Okay. Now, you brought to mind education is critical. Finland now has instigated critical thinking classes from K through high school, where they're teaching children how to think for themselves on the internet, how to discern what is believable and what is not. So, they're embedding that into their education curriculum.
Michelle: Yeah, well, actually, we were very active on getting passed a new civics bill here that also passed the Minnesota Legislature in 2023. And this was with both a Republican and a Democrat in our state House and Senate. We passed a civics bill that requires all public schools in Minnesota to teach civics in 11th and 12th grade at some point, so that they are now aligned with when they're going to vote.
Michelle: We also advocated for and got into place pre-registration of 16- and 17-year-olds so that that civics learning can be embodied in. This is how you're going to demonstrate you're a good citizen or one of the ways is through active and informed voting. And so, we are also part of a group that is working with the Minnesota Council Social Studies to help with that new implementation of the law.
Michelle: We're going to be attending there annual conference in February and trying to help teachers to get connected to all the different civic resources that are out there. There are many, many people doing good things. Again, especially here in Minnesota, there's a vibrant civic culture in Minnesota.
Michelle: We're trying to really lift that up and help make it easier for teachers to provide not just the book learning about our government, but also that student engagement through participating with groups like, Like Ours. Also, we partner with the YMCA, Youth in Government, their Youth Voter Project.
Michelle: There's a great group called Youth on Boards that get youth involved in being on local county and city boards and. It's an exciting time for civics learning. People see the importance that we've lost some ground, maybe, as we were moving ahead in, in STEM learning and reading and other things.
Pat: Michelle, I gotta tell you, this political season, and I don't think I'm alone in saying this, has been very stressful, and to listen to you talk about all the wonderful things that people are doing is truly heartening . It really is. It's really heartening and that brings me the 2016 election brought challenges to the civil discourse and trust in the election process.
Pat: particularly with the involvement of the electoral college. And I'd like to know what did that 2016 election and the aftermath, how did that impact the league's work?
Michelle: Yeah, good question. First of all, I think we basically have at least three most recent presidents who were not elected with the majority vote, right?
Michelle: Of the popular vote of people. And that was the case in 2016 with Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote, but not the popular vote. And so, we as the League of Women Voters have had a long-standing position in opposition to the Electoral College. It is an outdated mechanism in our constitution that was actually built around slavery and, a way to apportion votes when slaves were two-thirds people.
Michelle: It's an obsolete way of seeing the world now. And that is to think about our constitution. We have what, I don't know, I have to remember how many amendments we have, 28, 29, I should know. But we have quite a few, right? But the amendments are an acknowledgement that things change, times change, and our forefathers could only see so far.
Michelle: And Electoral College is one of those things. And so there's a couple different ways of hitting that. And one of them we actually passed here in Minnesota, which is we are now part of the National Popular Vote Compact. The National Popular Vote Compact is a way of states saying, yep, we will assign all our voters to the person who has the most votes.
Michelle: All our electors have the most votes. So our belief as a League always has been as one person, one vote. And how does that get carried out? So, we actually are kind of moonshot In this next 10 years really is trying to replace the electoral college, either abolish it outright, the constitutional amendment, which would be harder, but also through or through the National Popular Vote Compact.
Michelle: That is a big deal, right? It's hard to imagine that somebody could become president. And 7 million people said no, regardless of the party, you can see where it creates friction, right? We also are very involved, the things that hook up in there and that whole piece is redistricting, right?
Michelle: Census, so the census, redistricting, gerrymandering.
Pat: Gerrymandering in U. S. politics is the practice of drawing the boundaries of electoral districts in a way that gives one political party an unfair advantage over its rivals or dilutes the voting power of members of ethnic or linguistic minority groups.
Pat: Okay, back to Michelle.
Michelle: All those things that affect one person, one vote, how do we get as close as we can that every vote matters and every race. And those things are making sure our population is fully accurately counted and that voting districts are signed on an equal basis. And those things are not as easy, you know, it's true.
Michelle: They're all hard. We've been very involved in the census, very involved in redistricting here in Minnesota. We managed through our advocacy in 2020 with the census to create some new things. In Minnesota, redistricting is supposed to be done by the legislature. They haven't been able to do it for 60 years and it's gone to the courts.
Michelle: We participate through lawsuits and litigation. An example would be, White Earth Nation was one of those that was cut in half. We were able to pack them into one district, which was the request to give them more voting power. You have what you call packing, sometimes you want to crack it, to where there's too much voting power in one area to make it worthwhile too.
Michelle: It's a complicated process. But we've been very involved and engaged and we have, really strong group here in Minnesota, the Minnesota Census Partnership, working together to keep these things going. And I think that's another thing people have to remember, for us, democracy is 365 days a year.
Michelle: We don't just have elections and, oh, we go to bed now and, wake up, hibernate, wake up. There's a whole new day every day that is required. And that is when it all comes back to education again, too, because the Electoral College, redistricting, these are concepts that people just haven't had the luxury of studying, knowing, overseeing.
Michelle: It's really probably one of the pivotal things of our Leagues is in their communities to educate their communities about these Important issues so being informed on candidates But it's also being informed on these critical issues that we spend so much time on in our communities
Pat: Well, you kind of segue waying into my next question and you are touching on it. I want to move towards the human aspect, the emotional aspect of the misinformation and challenges surrounding the 2020.
Pat: I'm not talking about the 2024 election. I'm talking about the 2020 election. This saying anything and throwing anything out there. Misinformation. How has the league strengthened voter education and community outreach to restore that confidence and civic trust? The misinformation is so egregious at times.
Pat: And so, how do you deal with that as a League? How do you handle that to restore confidence and civic trust?
Michelle: Well, if we had a great answer, we'd be really rich by now, right? Yeah, you would. It's a tough, tough, but again, I will tell you history helps me because I think about all the challenges we've had.
Michelle: You just have to go back to the 60s in the civil rights era and think what it must have been like to live with such, you want to talk polarization, right? I mean, just outright. Racism at its utmost worst. And we worked through that, right? I mean, yes, systemic racism is in place. We see that.
Michelle: We of course had that here in our horrible murder of George Floyd is another wakeup call and reminder that systemic racism lives within our culture. But we've made amazing strides to as a nation and cities and counties and states to do that. So, I think you have to always take the position that listen, we've had hard things before, you] know, and we grew it.
Michelle: And part of it is in my mind, and this is again, part of the staying power of the League is you stay the course. That we have to keep the good information flowing. I love metaphors, so I was like, well, if you want to prevent the weeds, you have to have good soil. You could go around spring, RoundUp on all your weeds, or you could have better soil so the weeds don't grow, and I think that's our role.
Michelle: It's difficult to just go around with Roundup all the time and go, you're wrong, you're wrong, you're wrong. And we do do that. I mean, we have on our website, we have a whole Elections411, and we have myths. These are myths that are out there. These are the truth. But we just keep seeding the soil with the right information and the good information.
Michelle: And the way we do it, too, is like we did, like at our state league, we created sample letters to the editor that our local leagues could put in their local papers or distribute through other sources. If you look at the press page on our state, LWVMN. org our website, we have dozens and dozens and dozens of press coverage all over the state, especially out in Greater Minnesota to keep that good information flowing, keep that soil strong.
Michelle: We also really show up in person and that in the reality is a lot of people don't understand about elections. Elections really are local. That's the good news and some might think the bad news, but the good news is that no one president can just change the elections just like that, because they're all grounded in a statewide and then a countywide approach.
Michelle: The most powerful people you can know right now are your county commissioners and your election officials. We really work hard for our local Leagues to get to know them, to understand, to support them because we know about things like harassment, but we also show up. We've been active in many groups.
Michelle: There's many election denier groups, just to say that's what they are. We certainly encourage people to have questions. There's nothing wrong with asking critical questions about the safety of our election equipment or the safety of mail-in voting. We encourage people to ask the questions.
Michelle: But once you've gotten the answer from all the reputable sources, you also need to take that in. That's what learning is, right? And so we often are in county courtrooms with people who feel very differently about these things. And we've watched the civil discourse break down. We've watched the challenge that the counties have, but just being present.
Michelle: Just being present in the room has helped. We get county commissioners and election officials say all the time to us, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much. Because if they're only hearing from the election deniers, then you know that thing. So we're trying to do more and more to within our communities to befriend our election officials and the whole team to keep learning.
Michelle: Keep learning. Bringing that out. The other thing we would say on the social discourse side is we did join ranks also with Braver Angels. Braver Angels is an organization nationwide, but here in Minnesota, that intentionally brings red and blue people together to try to humanize each other and move beyond the rancor.
Michelle: They started a program before this election called Reduce the Rancor and they got Ken Martin from the Democratic Party here, DFL here in Minnesota.
Pat: The Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor DFL Party was created in April 1944 after the Minnesota Democrats merged with the Farmer Labor Party. Hubert Humphrey was instrumental in the merger and is considered to be the founder of the Minnesota DFL Party.
Pat: Okay, back to Michelle.
Michelle: And David Hann, who is the head of the Republican Party, the GOP, to both sit down together and both champ and reduce the rancor. We were at that kickoff last February. The idea was to try to reduce the rancor. It's easier said than done, but we also met with both chairs about our candidate forums because more and more we've had Republicans decide not to participate in our candidate forums because they look at our issues and say, your issues are to Democrat.
Michelle: And our issues have stayed the same, but I always say, hey, the Chamber of Commerce has issues too, you know we're professionals, we can wear different hats and do different things. I think in Minnesota, we maybe made a dent or two in it, but it is, it's tough, right?
Michelle: And so, the other thing again, just to age myself as I go back to Goofus and Gallant from the Highlights magazines. Have any of you? Oh, yeah. I used to read that all the time. And I'm constantly finding how important that is. Like, well, Goofus would say it that way, but here's how Gallant would say it.
Michelle: I feel like we all need more Gallant language and that's on all sides. It is unfortunate. I think what you're saying is I sort of feel like a, a geode broke after 2016 that just [erupted this air that now people can use whatever language they want. And having sat through many, many legislative sessions and debate over the last 20 years, it's really sad to see the personalization.
Michelle: It's always good to get in there and have a good fight on an issue, right? And to get your issues out there, but the personalization of it, I don't care what party you're with, what candidate you are. We just somehow have to learn basic common decency again. And I don't know where that comes from, but I just say, Hey, I can't control everyone else, but I can control my behavior.
Michelle: I can be a role model. And that's how I think we feel as the League of Women Voters. We can be role models in having good civil discourse. People feel like, well, there's threats to our, I mean, the interesting thing when you listen to it. Is both sides feel like our democracy is threatened. Both sides are saying there's fascists on the other side.
Michelle: We have to reckon with where we're at, but we've reckoned with many other things in the past, and I believe you've got to stick with it and you can't throw it out. I think it's easy to just say. Well, I'm just filled to capacity. Thank you. I don't want to, I don't want to do that anymore. But capacity should be like in your show.
Michelle: Hey, you have the capacity to do more things than you think. We need to go through this and we need to figure it out, but we can't walk away from it because our future depends on it. And then, sometimes you just got to be the change you want to see in the world. Yeah.
Pat: I'm curious, how do you fund the league?
Pat: Where do you get monies from?
Michelle: There's another good, tough question, but in short, our local Leagues get money from membership. We are sort of a triumvirate organization. Still, we have a national League and then we have 50 state leagues plus 52, essentially. And then we have local Leagues, and we have 35 of them here in Minnesota.
Michelle: And so dues are paid. Usually they've been paid to local Leagues and then they pay state and pay national for a bit of all the work we do. That sent that model is going to change, but dues are part of it. People still pay depending on sliding fee scale or whatever, around 65 or so a year or whatever.
Michelle: Dues are part of it more for the local Leagues at the state level. It only accounts for 10 percent of our budget. And the other really 85 percent is donors, donors, donors, committed people who believe in it. And then grants, we used to get a lot more grants. We had a lot of grant support back in the day, but as there are more players and more commitment to funding, communities of color, which is
Michelle: appropriate. And we understand that we don't get as many grant dollars as we used to. So we're always trying to beef up our local, our regular donors. So yeah, it's still a donated donation world as most nonprofits are. Okay. No government money here. We do take on a contract here. There's sometimes for a little bit of extra work with Hennepin County.
Michelle: We've been working on our youth voters with Hennepin County and some things like that. Nice.
Pat: I'm curious, once the votes are cast and election day is over, what happens behind the scenes? Can you walk us through the post-election day process? What happens? Like, how do we know that every vote is properly counted, and the integrity is maintained?
Michelle: Well, great question. So, a couple things. One is, just because of time and everything, I would really encourage people to go to our website and look at our elections411 page, because we do walk through it all. We talk about all the safeguards and all the things, whether it's absentee voting or mail-in voting.
Michelle: But in short, our counties run the elections and our counties work with paid staff and professionals who know this work and do a good job, but then they use 30, 000 people, which I think you put in your wonderful artwork for today, which I just love. And, about 30, 000 plus Minnesotans to be election judges.
Michelle: If I had to bet, I would say at least a third or if not half of our members also serve as election judges, but serve as election judges, which are often paid. There's semi volunteer, but paid usually to work in, but they're all in our neighborhoods, right?
Michelle: These are our friends, our neighbors. Most importantly, in the last, the thing to remember is everything is done on a bipartisan basis. There is not a single procedure that isn't really overseen by both the Republican and Democrat together. When they open up the office in the morning, when they tabulate the votes at the end, when they're pushing the tabulator into the closet or wherever, they're always being overseen, a party balance is put in place.
Michelle: That's what really, again, when people have sort of conspiracy theories, it's like, it would have to be a pretty interesting conspiracy because both parties would have to work together, right? Because there is no one party ballots are opened by the ballot board, absentee ballots by on a party balance basis.
Michelle: And there's so much testing that all of the machinery is tested. I was just at the public accuracy test last week in Hennepin County. Well, that was on the 15th. I don't know what the days are blurring. We test all the equipment in public, but the real new thing on the block, it's not new, it's always been there, but what's of most interest and most concern in this election is to your point, what happens when it's all said and done?
Michelle: It's November 5th. It's 10 o'clock at night. What happens now? And the certification of our election, how we know our ballots, how our ballots are managed, how we audit the process is becoming a bigger deal because people feel that, and that is the way we've known our elections are fair and accurate is through what is called here in Minnesota.
Michelle: Now, all the states do things a little differently, but they're all in the same space. There are audits. We just call it the post-election review. So here in Minnesota, what happens when everything goes to the county, then the canvas boards will meet. So, by statute, every county selects a canvas board with people on it that are all in statute.
Michelle: It tells you It's usually the mayor of the highest populated city. I can't remember all, two members of the county or whatever. And they will then randomly select precincts that will be fully recounted. We have paper ballots, so they will say, okay, here were the results on November 5th.
Michelle: We're now going to hand count these races in these precincts and make sure that is true. And 99. 9 percent of the time over the past, decades after decades, it is true. We've never had and found fraud, even in a complete recount, the Franken Coleman.
Pat: Okay, here's what happened. In the 2008 Minnesota Senate race, Democrat Al Franken narrowly defeated Republican incumbent Norm Coleman by 312 votes after an intense eight-month legal battle.
Pat: Initially, Coleman led by 215 votes triggering a recount. By January Franken was up by 225 votes, but Coleman challenged the results in court. The Minnesota Supreme Court confirmed Franken's win on June 30th. 2009, and he was sworn in nearly six months after the term began- a rare hard-fought victory decided by razor thin margins.
Michelle: showed that there was not enough discrepancy, and it wasn't fraud.
Michelle: It's a human process. Things can happen, right? The circle isn't filled in just right , or a paper gets folded as it goes through the ballot. Those types of things are out there, but it's never ever been enough to change the outcome of an election.
Michelle: Any election that's super close is going to be recounted anyway. And anyone can also ask for a recount if they felt there was something untoward. But the post-election review process is something we participate in the League of Women Voters, we will be out there right now we have over 140 I think volunteers getting trained and ready to observe the post-election review and over 35 counties in Minnesota,
Michelle: where there are some of the more bigger issues. And so that's another way we like quadruple, monitor. Okay. There's all these things that happen on a party balance. Then we have this audit and we're reviewing the audit. We do a report and then we can go back to the counties and say, you know what?
Michelle: Your elections were fair and accurate, or here's things we've learned, things you have to do. So, it's just a really great. And I think people need to learn about it. It's unfortunate that people do learn sometimes and then they just won't believe it because they just won't believe anything anybody says.
Michelle: You have to say, what is the basis for that, right? So it's a more challenging time. I am concerned. I'm very concerned actually about our post-election review and the canvas for the certification process here in Minnesota and all around the country. If the current group of election deniers don't get the result they want, we've seen what happened on January 6th.
Michelle: So now we know what's possible. And that's very sobering. We're trying to work hard with the counties to say, listen, you need to have safe and secure meetings and rules and consequences for people who participate in these public, I mean, these are all public viewable events. So, you know, I could maybe come back later and let you know how it all went.
Pat: Yes. As we wind down towards the hour, we're at a time when trust in institutions is really declining and I think there's a level of stress among voters, whatever side you're on, and with all that's happening, and it seems like the rhetoric as we're getting closer to Election Day ramps up even more, what would you say to voters out there, based on your vantage point, being Executive Director of the League of Women Voters here in Minnesota, what would you say to voters right now?
Michelle: Hey, in Minnesota- never been easier to vote. We had 32 new election laws put in place in 23. If you don't speak English as your main language, we have things in 12 languages. Now you can bring as many people as you need to help you vote. You can vote from home, and no one has to go to the polls.
Michelle: If they're worried, we have so many really good voting rules in place that shouldn't be a barrier for people, number one. Number two, this is what we do. This is how, if you care passionately about an issue, then you better vote. Even if your candidate isn't going to do exactly what you think they're going to do, they're certainly not going to listen to you if you're not a voter.
Michelle: And that's like your ticket in, right? Like voting is your ticket into the democracy to say, listen, Hey, I'm a voter. You're my representative and I want to talk to you about this. And people listen to those voters. I think too, to be the hopeful side is, we've had tough times before, you can't let that keep you away.
Michelle: If you fear for your safety or something like that, again, you can vote from home. You can bring friends. There's lots of things. You have a disability; you can't get out. There's so many ways to help people vote. It is our duty. I'm actually speaking tonight at an event, World Without Genocide, about looking at all the dictators around the world right now, people who've been in power for 34 years and 40 years, look around a little bit, you realize that this is very precious in a very young, a democracy.
Michelle: We are an extraordinarily young country. I was in Europe this summer and it always is a reminder to me, Oh my gosh, we're like this baby. And so we got to play our part. The other thing I'll say to voters is once you're done, then you've got to keep going. Find a way to plug into your community.
Michelle: Get involved in some group, serve on a commission, an advisory board, learn how government works. And also, just get to know who your officials are. They are human beings. As someone, again, who's elected official, my school board. It's very weird to have people just come and yell at you about things.
Michelle: I'm like, number one, not very persuasive. Number two, there's a lot to think about when you are an elected official. And so, we also need to stop the vilification of all elected officials. Everyone is doing their best. It's absolutely great to hold them accountable, to ask questions, but we have to start to imagine ourselves-
Michelle: how do we want to be treated? Use the old adages, right? The old golden rule. What happened to some of these basic things, get out there, show your passion by voting and then get involved, get engaged. If your candidate doesn't win, my daughter played hockey, and we were not a, we were like a musical theater group, but , my daughter played hockey, and we're like, okay, I'm gonna learn this whole sports thing, and at the end of the game, all in hockey, it's such a violent sport, and then they all go and fist bump each other at the end- they all go through a line and shake their hand.
Michelle: And I was like, this is what we need to do people, follow the sports people. You may win. You may lose. Someone will lose, but we need to, fist bump and move on and then go play hard at the next game and come around and try to do it again. But you know what they don't do? They don't take the hockey stick and hit somebody over the head with it.
Michelle: And that's what we saw on January 6th. That was the line crossed, right? We can be mad, we'll be sad. Lots of things will happen when our candidates don't win from all sides. But we get back up and we get started and we do not take violence upon our people. That is what makes democracy special, is that we always have another chance to understand and learn and tell our story through the next vote.
Michelle: So, get out there. Don't forget those down ballots too, you really need to learn about your local candidates. There's a lot of people out there looking for your vote and it's great to, get on. We've most, all of our candidate forums are taped. They're all on our website as well.
Michelle: If people want to look at those and try to pick one news source that isn't your normal too. And please don't let it be just a social media source. Find some sources, read around. Talk to people. Don't hide it. Politics is, hey, who are you going to vote for? What are you doing? What are you thinking?
Michelle: Make your plan and get out there and do it right.
Pat: Whoa, Michelle Witte, thank you for giving us a behind the scenes look at what makes our democracy work and from the dedicated volunteers to the safeguards that protects every vote. And it's clear that the League is not just about elections, it's about building trust, empowering citizens, and keeping the spirit of democracy alive.
Pat: The League of Women Voters across this country are the unsung heroes of our democratic process and now more than ever we need that strength and dedication Thank you Michelle for joining us today And just teaching us so much
Michelle: This was great I could talk another hour
Pat: So oh my god, I could listen to you for another hour Well, okay listeners.
Pat: We'll cut you a break. Thank you for listening and for joining us today and please vote Thanks again for being here. Bye
Michelle: Bye bye
