The people in charge of Minneapolis elections have given up the search for about 133 ballots that were cast and then, supposedly, cast to the wind. On Friday, I watched the city elections staff as they combed through their warehouse, assisted by clean-election advocates and a deputy secretary of state, in the hunt for the missing envelope. On Monday, the Great Ballot Hunt was officially over.

Not for me. On Monday, I visited the erstwhile polling place, the University Lutheran Church of Hope, whose gothic stone bulk looms over a corner in Dinkytown. On Nov. 4, voters entered through the glass doors of the modern addition on the building’s north side, wound through the corridors, down the stairs and into the fellowship hall to vote, church administrator Craig M. Wiester told me.

On Election Day, Wiester stayed until the last official left at 11:55 p.m. Since then, he hasn’t found any envelopes lying around that might hold the key to the closest U.S. Senate race in recent history.

“We have taken a look around the building,” he said. It didn’t take long. “There aren’t nooks and crannies in the fellowship hall,” he said.

He spoke to city of Minneapolis officials a week or 10 days ago, he said, but they declined an offer to search the hall themselves.

Cindy Reichert, Minneapolis’s election director, explained that decision: “We did speak to the pastor and the custodian, who have looked through the church. We trust them.”

I, on the other hand, was eager to conduct my own search. It was hardly an example of “forensic searches of places of worship” that Sen. Norm Coleman’s campaign warned against last week. But it was instructive.

Wiester led me down the steps, through a smaller chamber and down a ramp into the fellowship hall. There, florescent bulbs cast a bright light on stacked chairs and folded tables. There wasn’t a scrap of paper in sight. Julius Kern, the janitor, told me he assisted in the envelope hunt, without success. A closet in the room holds nothing but the fire alarm controls and his “burnisher,” which he uses to keep the floors shiny.

Against one wall was a piano. I opened the bench. It looked like the perfect stash. Inside were only some sheet music and a tambourine. A kitchen was adjacent to the fellowship hall, but it seemed unlikely the ballots would be hiding in one of the big soup pots. So Wiester and I went back upstairs to his office.

Wiester said the church did not relish its recent attention. Getting involved in partisan politics could jeopardize a church’s tax-exempt status, Wiester said, so it’s taboo at University Lutheran Church of Hope.

“We certainly don’t want anyone to think there was any chicanery,” he said. ‘We just rented the space” to the city for the election.

Reichert said that the city believes the ballots were lost, somehow, even though there were procedures in place to prevent that sort of thing from happening. The head election judge for the precinct remembers taking the envelopes full of ballots from the precinct and delivering them to the warehouse in the early hours of Nov. 5, Reichert said. But only four of the five could be found, and the missing one wasn’t in his trunk. Reichert doesn’t think anyone stole the envelope from the warehouse.

“I think it’s more likely something was dropped in the dark,” she said. “It’s a mystery.”

Reichert, who has only praise for her election judges, said she had never experienced such an event in her years overseeing elections in St. Louis Park and Minneapolis. Still, “When would you find that out? You would find that out in a recount situation, intended to show where human errors exist.”

She is convinced the ballots were indeed cast. The number of signatures on the rosters is 2,027, while the machines show 2,028 votes were cast in the precincts. Such a discrepancy is not unusual, she said. It’s up to the State Canvassing Board to decide whether to accept the machine count, or the recount totals. Unless, of course, I find those ballots.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 8th, 2008 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Recount. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.