Edina Republican Snatches Likely DFL Domain Names

They say the early bird gets the worm. For Democrats in the new Senate District 49—which includes Edina and Bloomington—that means losing out on a number of potential domain names.

Angela Berger, an Edina Republican who manages the website for the Senate District 41 (and soon to be SD49) GOP, laid claim to a number of web addresses before local DFL party officials could do the same. A quick search shows Berger as registrant of domain names sd49democrats.org, sd49democrats.com, sd49dfl.org, sd49dfl.com and dflsd49.com. All of the domain names were registered Feb. 21—the same day the Supreme Court .

When reached by phone Thursday, Berger declined comment.

Lynn Swon, co-chair of the Senate District 41 GOP, also declined comment on the situation. 

"I've talked with Angie Berger and there is no comment on this end," she said.

Edina resident Tom LaForce, who heads up the Facebook community Politics In Edina, was the first to make the discovery. LaForce was doing a quick Internet search to see if the district officials had locked up a new address for their website.

As they've been using sd41democrats.org, he started there. LaForce said he was surprised to find it already was registered to Berger. So he tried another. Then another. Berger's name kept popping up as the registrant.

Tim O'Brien, an active member of the Senate District 41 DFL party and a longtime political activist, said he isn't aware of anyone taking this sort of action within the state of Minnesota in the past.

"We're more than willing to take on Republicans in the marketplace of ideas, but this is unfortunately a brand new step in politics for this area," O'Brien said.

DFL officials are concerned about the average person trying to get ahold of their website, but mistakenly being directed to "some oddball site," according to O'Brien. He said the hope is that Berger will have second thoughts about "this stunt," and give ownership of the domain names to the DFL party.

"If she doesn't, we're hoping the local republican organization comes to the mind that this is not a good idea and attempts to influence her or at least disavows her action," O'Brien said. "In the absence of either of these scenarios, we're looking into what rights we have under state and federal law."

"This could reasonably be construed as a major interference with our political rights," he said.