A look at voting from a retirement home in Minnesota – InForum

ST.PAUL — Susan Kalin, 82, remembers standing in line at the polls behind Tiny Tim, a famous local musician, at the Barton School in Minneapolis. She said, as she imitated him strumming a ukulele, that even in the voting line, Tiny Tim had his ukulele with him.

“He was very strange. So strange,” Kalin said. “But anyway, he stood in line in front of me, and I remember the charm of going to the polls and having lines of people and talking to people, and I mean you didn’t necessarily talk about politics, but you just talked .’

In recent years, Kalin has opted for absentee ballots, partly because of COVID-19, but mostly, she says, because the polls don’t have the same feel they used to.

Abby Dawkins, 87, said she has also voted in every election in recent years and voted by mail, but for different reasons.

“I didn’t know what the weather would be like,” Dawkins said. “We don’t drive. So even though they offered rides here, I thought it would be so much easier to sit in my living room and vote. It seemed logical, easy and yes, painless.

Kalin and Dawkins live in the Marvella retirement community in St. Paul, and have both only lived there for a few years. Marvella offers its residents rides to the polls, but not all retirement homes do the same.

Nick Strunk, a voter outreach specialist at the State Department, said the agency has seen an increase in questions from seniors as Election Day approaches. Strunk said most of the questions come from people who don’t have family members to take them to the polls, or who live in facilities that don’t have the capacity to assist with voting.

“They are still a population that is experiencing increasing barriers to accessing those resources,” Strunk said.

In 2018, the Office of the Secretary of State of Minnesota

registered a small decline

in attendance over 80 years, reaching a turnout of approximately 60%. It also found that the 70+ age group made up the largest portion of absentee voting before COVID-19.

Strunk says he typically forwards these questions to local elected officials, who can point voters to options. He said another program the state offers is the Health Care Facility Voting Program, which applies specifically to nursing homes, hospitals and residential treatment centers.

“That’s just a tool for the county election officials or local election officials, whether that’s the accountant or a full-time city clerk, to then coordinate and manage absentee voting directly to these populations,” he said.

Strunk said judges from each party are sent to perform absentee voting duties within the facilities to ensure voter integrity.

As talk of election security surfaces closer to November 5, there is one concern: the potential for “ballot harvesting” among these “vulnerable” populations. In Duluth,

a woman recently forged a ballot for her mother,

who died in August and claimed her mother hoped to vote for Trump.

Dawkins says she isn’t too concerned about election security when it comes to absentee voting.

“I decided to just trust that it would work, instead of being unsure and worried about it,” she said.

Strunk said he has had a few election security conversations with members of these communities.

“It’s usually more about safety issues, or their safety concerns, not from the lens of it being taken advantage of, but just general concerns about overall safety,” he said.

Strunk said he has not generally seen this as a major concern among members of the senior community, and encourages people to look to Minnesota’s election security laws for additional confidence.

Kalin said that while she is concerned about her population, she is equally concerned about all other vulnerable populations during the election.

“I think there are plenty of populations that need just as much attention,” she said. “I mean, what happens to all these homeless people? What about these people who are wrongly imprisoned? You know, they haven’t been able to vote all these years during their false imprisonment.”

Dawkins said an additional resource she has noticed while living in assisted living is the larger community. She says Marvella has all kinds of classes, lectures and discussion opportunities.

Strunk said his office is organizing meetings like Dawkins described, working with organizations like AARP and Prespretarian Homes to spread nonpartisan resources around voting among the older population.

“Myself or my colleagues go to assisted living or high-rise association meetings, or have an event where I can access the resources and give a short presentation or just chat with a few dozen people from the community. members of the institution,” he said.

Strunk said he has noticed that older generations are more likely to opt for absentee voting, as Dawkins and Kalin did, and that voters now have the option to vote

automatically receive absence

votes every election.

Dawkins said she was really thinking about women this election.

“The whole issue of choice and women, women’s health, women’s right to choose,” she said. “Who will care for them and how they will be cared for is critical. What has happened to the role of women, that has been fought for so hard since women’s suffrage… It is unconscionable to let someone choose for me what will happen to my body.”

Kalin said that as a former teacher, she is concerned with education at the local level and book banning at the national level.

Dawkins and Kalin talked about the election with candidates Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater and recalled how tense that election was.

“That seems so friendly, doesn’t it?” Dawkins asked Kalin.

Kalin agreed: “At least my memory is that it didn’t have the intensity, the ferocity and the venom that this one has.”

Kalin said she remembers being in her cabin in Balsam Lake when she found out Hubert Humphrey won the vice presidency. She said she and her cousins ​​took out their pots and pans and had a parade.

“We remembered that when Tim Walz was nominated this year because it kind of had the same feeling, you know: that hometown boy made it big,” she said.

Kalin speculated about what she would do and what would happen if the election went as she hoped.

“I will jump for joy. I’ll drink all night and grab the pots and pans, and we’ll march down this hall. My shoulders will drop…your bursitis will go away,” Kalin said, pointing to her friend’s sore hip.

If the election doesn’t go her way, Kalin said, “I have a list on my phone of nine countries I’d like to go to.”