Star Tribune
What to do if your voter registration is challenged
Kirsten Johansen was puzzled when she went to cast her ballot on the first day of early voting and was told by an election worker that her registration had been challenged.
“I was shocked,” said Johansen, an Edina resident, who hasn’t moved and recently cast a ballot in the May special election for Hennepin County commissioner. She figured double-checking her registration for the general election was unnecessary.
“I thought, of course I’m registered, I just voted a couple of months ago,” she said. “I got there and the woman said, ‘Sorry, it appears you’re a challenged voter.’”
Johansen said she doesn’t know why her registration was challenged. It didn’t happen to two other members of her household.
Johansen is among a small group whose voter registrations are challenged each year because of a discrepancy in data the state collects and analyzes to ensure the voter rolls are accurate. Big jumps in registrations around important elections can lead to more challenged voters.
Minnesota election officials routinely compare voter registrations with data they receive from other state and federal databases such as Driver and Vehicle Services, the Social Security Administration, the Department of Health and court records, said Secretary of State Steve Simon.
Typically, a registration is challenged because a postal verification card sent to a voter’s home is returned as undeliverable. But it can also happen if someone doesn’t vote for four years, they move, show up registered somewhere else, the courts deem them ineligible for some reason or for other less common reasons.
“Challenged status is a constant churn,” Simon said. “They are either removed or added, depending on the information that we get.”
On the other hand, crypto mining facilities and AI data centers often lead to noise complaints by neighbors. The machines used for crypto mining facilities and AI data centers operate around the clock and are usually cooled by banks of noisy fans.
When it opened in 2022, the crypto mining facility in Glencoe had sound levels of 80 to 85 decibels, about the same as a gasoline-powered lawnmower or leaf blower.
Eddie Gould, 80, said his blood pressure has increased since Revolve Labs, known at the time as Bit49, moved in next door. “The anxiety is high. It’s a major part of our life that wasn’t there before,” Gould said.
Gould walked out of his home on Thursday and held his phone out his back door, letting a loud, steady drone come through the speakers. “Nothing is going to replace the three years of torture we’ve had,” he said.
Similar noise complaints from residents living near crypto mining facilities have been reported in Texas, North Dakota and Arkansas.
In southwestern Minnesota, concerns about noise led to dozens of residents in Windom voicing their opposition in August to a conditional use application by Revolve Labs to build a facility there.
Wonderlust Productions’ co-artistic directors Alan Berks and Leah Cooper spent two years gathering tales and observations from caregivers for their play, “Thank You for Holding: The Caregiver Play Project.” (Jerry Holt/The Minnesota Star Tribune)
A few minutes into the scene on the park bench, the man mentions that he found himself caring for his wife quite unexpectedly. “I woke up one day to the reality that we don’t have as much control as we thought.”
Then he delivers a short monologue: “It’s part of our love story. She is always still exactly the same person to me. No matter what happens to her body, or mind. She is always a whole person, and I know she sees that I see her, and she feels less alone and less scared. It was unthinkable to me before that two people could be so intimately involved with each other. The things I now do for her — wiping her, dressing her. The things she allows me to do for her. The total trust it requires and love for her to allow me. The unconditional love we share, body, mind and spirit, and I feel this incredible reverence.”
Christin Lindberg recognizes that monologue. It contains some of her exact words.
Lindberg, a Minneapolis resident and research scientist for the Amherst H. Wilder Foundation, participated in one of the story circles. She talked about being a caregiver for her late husband, Roger Bechtel.
Lindberg and Bechtel had been together just five years when he was diagnosed with ALS (often called Lou Gehrig’s disease). Bechtel died in 2021, just one grueling year after his diagnosis.
Lindberg joined the story circle at the suggestion of a member of Wonderlust’s board of directors, a former theater student of Bechtel’s at Carleton College in Northfield, who knew their back story.
But they would not have advanced to remote corners of the state without help from anglers who began using them as live bait nearly a century ago.
“If you just introduced them in Minneapolis, and they moved on their own, around 20 or 30 feet a year, it would take, like, 10,000 years to get to the Boundary Waters,” said Lee Frelich, director of the University of Minnesota Center for Forest Ecology.
Instead they made the trip in decades.
There are now at least 15 different species of earthworms crawling in Minnesota dirt, according to the state’s Department of Natural Resources. None of them are native to this state or even this part of the globe.
There are some earthworms native to other parts of North America – including the Pacific Northwest and the southeastern United States. But those species didn’t crawl their way here. (It’s likely too harsh for them anyway.)
The earthworms in Minnesota came from Europe and from Asia.
