You can’t use a letter from your landlord as proof of residency if it isn’t addressed to you. That’s the message from Minneapolis election officials to about 300 residents of the Chateau co-op housing complex at the University of Minnesota campus.

Some of those would-be voters contacted the Election Protection Coalition hotline (866-OUR-VOTE). Mike Dean, executive director of Common Cause Minnesota who’s part of the coalition, said his group took the students’ case to the office of Secretary of State Mark Ritchie. State officials ruled that if the landlord revised the letter to address it to individual students, they could use it to help with registration, Dean said. So that’s what happened.

Dean is encouraging as many people who find themselves turned away at the polls to call the coalition hotline (866-OUR-VOTE). “We’re hearing about a lot of instances of people being turned away for reasons that are not legitimate.” Dean blamed it on mistakes by election judges, rather than any malicious intent.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Election Day, Polling problems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.