Yep; it can happen in my home state, too.
Thank you, Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie! (She said with sarcasm dripping......)
Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie has changed the Legislature's voter ID amendment title, "Photo identification required for voting, " into the following: "Changes to in-person & absentee voting & voter registration; provisional ballots." Ritchie, who is well read and well spoken, clearly had to go deep into the Orwellian playbook to come up with that one. But what explains this bizarre formulation that obviously seeks to obscure the initiative and confuse the voter? One of the best explanations we've heard is that Ritchie hopes to so confuse the voters that they simply throw up their hands and skip this ballot item altogether. Remember, by law in Minnesota, a nonvote on a constitutional amendment question has the same effect as a "no" vote.
The problem for the anti-ID group is that even in this solidly blue state, voter ID is a very popular concept. It is highly likely to pass because it's so intuitive. People get it. Virtually any activity of consequence in this society requires an ID. Perhaps the only exception is voting. Partisans went to great lengths to explain away vouched votes (try explaining vouched voting to out-of-state friends and relatives) and same-day registration and 1,000 felons voting in the last national election. But the voters don't buy it.
And the fact of the matter is, once these votes are cast -- valid or not -- they cannot be retrieved. You can't un-ring that bell.
The irony of course is that influencing people not to vote on this item is a form of voter suppression. So Ritchie, who claims to fear voter ID because it suppresses the vote, has apparently attempted to suppress the vote on that question in order to avoid future voter suppression. (Is there an echo in here?)
The tertiary irony is that the voters most likely to be confused by the language, those who are less informed, are the very voters Ritchie would argue he is trying to protect from the Voter ID amendment in the first place. So according to this theory, the Orwellian title is an attempt to suppress the vote of the very voters claimed to be the likely victims of voter suppression, because if unsuppressed these voters may unwittingly vote to suppress their own vote.
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