Somali translator on Coleman payroll reportedly pressured voters at polls.

[ProSense]

Somali translator on Coleman payroll reportedly pressured voters at polls.

On Election Day, the Minnesota Independent reported that a handful of voters of Somali origin at the Brian Coyle Center in Minneapolis said that “a translator working there was instructing people to vote for Sen. Norm Coleman.” This translator, Mahamoud Wardere, was also a staffer to the Coleman campaign, as the senator himself has acknowledged. As WCCO-TV reported yesterday, this news raises questions about whether Wardere violated state or federal election laws by instructing Somalis to vote for Coleman. Watch it:

http://thinkprogress.org/2008/11/06/coleman-somali/">Coleman Campaign Violations At Polls

[eleny]

1. ruh-roh

[jwirr]

2. Why do they - Minnesota officials - ask for people to come ahead

if this happened to them. There needs to be as much proof as we can get.

[Eric J in MN]

3. There may be a false equivalence in that video.

Someone who works for Norm Coleman telling people he's supposed to be translating for at the polls to vote for Norm Coleman is a serious breach of election law, linked to the Coleman campaign.

If someone who doesn't work for Al Franken engaged in similar behavior, that would also be a serious breach of election law, but not linked to the Franken campaign.

[ProSense]

4. Coleman is going to be toast. n/t

[azurnoir]

5. I think the real question here is

was the translator instructed to do this by Coleman's campaign?

[Eric J in MN]

6. Even given an unlikely scenario...

...in which the guy confesses to telling people he was translating for at the polls to vote for Norm Coleman, and a senior Coleman campaign official confesses that he told the guy to do it, I doubt that the US Senate would refuse to seat Norm Coleman as a result.

But there should be a police investigation.

[azurnoir]

7. I think Coleman would be all to happy to leave

this guy holding the bag.