Olmsted County Election Day delay remains under review
ROCHESTER — The reason for late Election Day results in Olmsted County continues to remain unclear.
Olmsted County residents had to wait until around 1 a.m. Wednesday to see results of local races and county officials are still trying to understand what went wrong.
Luke Turner, Olmsted County's associate director of Property Records and Licensing, said everything appeared to be set to go ahead of the election with three tests of uploading results to the Minnesota Secretary of State.
Those tests sent 7,900 ballots within three minutes, but the first batch of official Election Day ballots was double the test numbers.
"For this one, there were 16,000 ballots, and it took hours to get that across," Turner said Wednesday of Tuesday's initial upload of Olmsted County results. "The load time of results really got hung up there."
On Election Night, Mary Blair-Hoeft, the county's director of Property Records and Licensing, said the initial votes from local precincts started uploading around 10 p.m. The transfer of files wasn't completed until after midnight.
Turner said the added time required was a surprise and is being studied. The county is considering getting the election-machine vendor involved for added analysis.
"Without digging too far into the technical part yet, we're not sure why that was the case," he said of the delay. Until the cause is determined, Turner said it's difficult to say whether it's a local or state issue.
Olmsted County wasn't the only Minnesota County to see the first results posted with the state more than three or four hours after polls closed at 8 p.m.
At 11:30 p.m. Tuesday, 33 of the state's 87 counties hadn't posted any results, with the number dropping to 20 by midnight.
The bulk of Olmsted County's results were posted between 12:30 a.m. and 1 a.m., since elections staff members were able to start processing results as the initial upload was being transferred. The remaining 70,000 to 75,000 votes were uploaded in smaller bites, which took less overall time.
Turner said the technical issue wasn't the only delay, even though it added the greatest amount of time.
A new state requirement to accept hand-delivered absentee ballots until 8 p.m. on Election Day added staff work, since the county's ballot board was required to review and accept each qualified ballot.
"It caused significantly more work with a pretty steady stream of voters in the office to return ballots," he said.
Additionally, requirements related to write-in votes added time at polling sites and the elections office, because they needed to be documented in the election judges' initial review before the ballots and data could be hand delivered to the elections office. That's where staff doublechecked accuracy and prepared to upload the data.
Turner said other counties are able to submit results to the state more quickly by having election judges transmit data directly from polling sites, but Olmsted County opts to keep results offline for security and accuracy.
