Rep. Michele Bachmann’s voting history doesn’t appear on Minnesota’s public list of registered voters — at her own request, her spokesman said Thursday.
The list details when more than 3 million registered Minnesota voters cast ballots since 1994.
It also lists each voter’s address.
Bachmann asked to be removed from the list for privacy reasons, her spokesman, Sergio Gor, said Thursday.
As a result, the Minnesota Secretary of State’s Office has no publicly available record of the congresswoman’s having voted. The secretary of state’s office maintains the state’s voter registration records.
Bachmann, R-Stillwater, is a registered voter and voted regularly during those years, Gor said.
The St. Cloud Times requested the state’s voter registration database for a routine review of area candidates’ voting history dating back to 1994.
Minnesota statute says registered voters may request their information be pulled from the public list if it “is required for the safety of the voter or the voter’s family.”
Gor said Bachmann’s safety had not been threatened when she made the request.
Bachmann’s key election opponents, DFLer Tarryl Clark and the Independence Party’s Bob Anderson, are in the public list, as are the seven other members of Minnesota’s U.S. congressional delegation.
“I don’t think we can speak to the other members of Congress,” Gor said. “For her, it was just a privacy issue.”
A privacy issue? that's not what the law says:
Mark Anfinson, an attorney for the Minnesota Newspaper Association, said the law was changed to protect past or potential victims of domestic abuse.
“Simple privacy would not suffice” to meet that standard, Anfinson said.
What is Bachmann afraid of?
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