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Honorable Mayor and City Council Members February 17, 2022 Page 3 DOCSOPEN\MU210\4\780657.v4-2/17/22 timelines under which the city or petitioners were required to respond. This is significantly different than the petition submitted by the Petitioners under Minnesota Statutes, Section 410.12, as Minnesota Statutes, Section 410.12 includes timelines under which a city and any petitioners are to respond and submit amended materials. The Petitioners have had ample opportunity since February 4, 2022, to amend the petition and have chosen not to do so. The other cases involve disputes over: 1) whether using the State Voter Registration System to verify whether signatures were valid is appropriate; 2) whether one petition was sufficient to affect two ordinances; and 3) whether the summary provided in a petition was sufficient. None of the cases cited state that a City must accept a petition that only includes signatures and addresses as sufficient when a petitioner has time to amend a deficient petition or submit an entirely new petition. In fact, the cases cited either involved petitions that followed Minnesota Statute and Minnesota Rules or the petitioner remedied the deficiencies and submitted a petition in the proper form with the required information. The Petitioners have not utilized the time they have had to submit a petition that meets all of the requirements of Minnesota Statutes and Rules and which is in the proper form. III. Petitioners’ Decision Not to Submit an Amended or a New Petition The issue before the City Council and City Clerk simply comes down to the reality that the petition submitted by Petitioners on January 25, 2022, was deficient and did not include all the required information. The Petitioners had time to amend or submit a new petition. Instead, the Petitioners chose to first argue that Minnesota Rules Chapter 8205 does not apply to the submitted petition, and then alternatively argued that Minnesota Rules Chapter 8205 in fact does apply to the submitted petition, but that the City did not follow the required process. Petitioners have now requested that the City determine that their petition is sufficient, without submitting any of the additional information required by Minnesota Statutes, Section 410.12 and Minnesota Rules Chapter 8205. As the cases cited in the Perry letter provide, Minnesota Courts give great deference to petitions as they are usually put together by laypersons and not attorneys. Minnesota Courts have generally held that minor technicalities, such as an error in the summary or a petition asking two questions in one petition should not be used to establish the insufficiency of a petition. However, the Petitioners’ recent submission via the Perry Letter does not include information that the Minnesota Secretary of State has determined and established through the rulemaking process as being required for petitions. Instead of correcting this fatal error, the Petitioners argue that the City must accept the petition as sufficient without the information required by both Minnesota Statutes and Minnesota Rules and have made no effort to fix such error.5 5 Petitioners have requested that the City calculate the number of signatures required to meet the 5% of registered voters threshold in Minnesota Statutes, Section 410.12. The City has requested this information from the Ramsey County Elections Office and will provide the response to Petitioners.