Some may believe it is unfair to offer certain criticisms of the Minnesota License and Registration System (MNLARS) boondoggle, which Republicans in the Minnesota House are trying to pin on Gov. Mark Dayton. After all, the decision to upgrade MNLARS was made back in 2008, during the Pawlenty administration, and extra funding was approved in 2011, the last year of the Pawlenty administration. So why blame Dayton?

Well, the Dayton administration may have inherited the MNLARS project, but it had seven years to complete it and make sure it would do what it was supposed to do — before rolling it out to such dismal results last summer. The Pawlenty administration is not to blame for what the Dayton administration failed to do.

We do wonder, however, about why it should take 10 years to design and implement a computer system to upgrade a system that worked fairly well. After all, 10 years is an eternity in the lives of computers. The iPhone was introduced in 2007 and has gone through multiple upgrades and improvements since then. Whatever the MNLARS designers decided to do 10 years ago would have been obsolete five years ago, if not sooner.

For whatever reasons and in multiple ways, the state blew it on MNLARS. Before the state now dumps a bunch of money into repairs, best to know who to blame and how to avoid repeating the same egregious errors.