Unravelling a Ball of Twine

Via Mercury Rising, a couple of tangles:

1. Scroll way down for this:

   Minnesota Majority has already produced an ad calling Ritchie's integrity into question. The ad includes this text: "
   

   Well, guess what? Minnesotans recently learned that one of Secretary Ritchie's own employees appears to have voted illegally in at least two elections using a false identity. If Mark Ritchie can't smell voter fraud when it's right under his nose, how can we possibly trust him on Voter ID?

   A fascinating question, and what Minnesotans don't learn from that ad is that the indicted individual first voted in 2004, when Mary Kiffmeyer was Secretary of State; the employee was hired in 2005 and promoted in 2006, under Kiffmeyer's administration, as Fox9 News reported in Ritchie commends use of facial recognition tech in finding fraud.
   
   Kiffmeyer was the first executive director of Minnesota Majority. Using the group's own logic, if she couldn't smell fraud when it was right under her nose, how are we to trust her or Minnesota Majority on Voter ID?

2. From the description:
   

   Mary Kiffmeyer, former Secretary of State and executive director of Minnesota Majority, said in 2009 that it would be too expensive to ask the Department of Corrections to produce electronic data on convicted felons to the Secretary of State.

   Section 9 dealt with automatic motor voter registration, substituting an opt out system for the current opt-in provision, but Kiffmeyer's objection had to do with the supposed cost of constructing data systems to prevent felons and non-citizens from voting. Sections 6,7, and 8 of the bill would have required monthly review of data by the appropriate departments to make sure that people registering were eligible.
   
   This is a surprising argument from a supporter of "voting integrity," because we're told repeatedly that no cost is too great to the counties and townships to prevent voter impersonation by requiring a government-issued PhotoID to vote.

Both of these stories are from Bluestem Prairie and overlap to some extent. Apparently a spot of voter fraud committed by someone hired and promoted by the then-Secretary of State of Minnesota and discovered by the current-Secretary of State of Minnesota is the fault of...the current-Secretary of State of Minnesota.

No, I don't get it either.