When will results be ready for Olmsted County on Election Night? It might be late
Nov. 2—ROCHESTER — The outcome of Rochester's City Council races, among other local, state and national contests, might not be known before many residents go to sleep on Election Night.
In Rochester, "The first judges will likely arrive at elections headquarters around 9 p.m., and first results would start to be uploaded around 9:30 p.m.," Rochester Deputy City Clerk Christiaan Cartwright. "All results, however, might not be uploaded until later in the evening, 11:30 p.m. being the absolute earliest for all results reported."
The process for tallying and reporting election results starts at the polling places, where election judges tear down and pack equipment as others complete reports accounting for all ballots — both used and unused — after polls close at 8 p.m. Tuesday.
"They're really balancing an inventory, so if we gave them 1,000 ballots and they had 500 votes, there's 500 blanks," Luke Turner, Olmsted County's associate director of Property Records and Licensing.
Judges will also count certified write-in votes for two countywide soil and water supervisor races, which include one District 4 candidate on the ballot and a certified write-in candidate, Louis Seifert, in the District 5 seat.
Once the ballots are sealed and equipment is locked and secured, the election results from the voting machine will be transported to the Olmsted County Elections Office on a USB flash drive, where the data will be checked to ensure it matches the report from the election judges.
At that point, the tally from the precinct will be merged with absentee ballots submitted by voters from the same area to generate the final vote count from each precinct.
As of Tuesday, Oct. 29, a week before the election, 21,270 absentee ballots had been accepted at the Olmsted County Elections Office, and Turner said in-person direct balloting was seeing 750 to 1,050 voters per day.
Absentee ballots will continue to be delivered by mail through Election Day.
"I'm assuming we'll have hundreds, if not thousands, arriving in the mail that day, " Turner said.
Once the tallies from a precinct are combined, they are ready to be sent to the Minnesota Secretary of State, which is the first time any of the data is put on a computer or other device connected to the internet.
"That's when we're looking to pull results off of that compilation computer and uploading them to the state in those batches every half hour starting at 9 (p.m.)," Turner said, adding that the goal of starting at 9 p.m. could be a struggle because that's the same time that results from several precincts could be hand-delivered.
"We always have a goal to get it out as soon as possible, and that goal is immediately crushed when we get 15 judges all back at once," he said.
With four full-time elections staff members, 20 provisional election assistants and 10 to 15 added staff from the county's Property Records and Licensing department working to oversee and organize the process for accepting ballots and sending results on Election Night, Turner said the workload is intense.
"The challenge on Election Day for us is getting the judges through the process," he said. "It's a massive project every year. We want to make sure that we accurately inventory everything and that we got everything back from the poll."
With election judges working 12 to 13 hours before turning in results, Turner said, making sure they can turn in their results and head home is important, but could delay the uploading process at times.
"The staff time is more important for moving the election judges through at a good pace," he said.
In some Minnesota counties, the hands-on challenge is lightened by allowing election judges to directly upload results from polling sites.
"As soon as the judges closed polls, they have an option to transmit to the state site or to the county site and then the state, so you're getting that instantaneously," he said of other counties. "There's no drive time. There's no extra delay for us to review the paperwork and double check everything."
That is not how Olmsted County operates. Because the local elections office is centrally located in Olmsted County, Turner said county officials have opted for added offline oversight.
"We can get them in in good time, and we like the idea of having that extra layer of security" by keeping voting results in hand, rather than transmitting them electronically from precincts to the local elections office, he said.
On the city side in Rochester, Cartwright said efforts are made to streamline the hands-on process, with approximately 840 election judges working throughout 45 polling locations on Election Day. He said the number of judges per site varies, since some include multiple precincts and heavier anticipated workloads.
Cartwright said the city created a new position among election judges. The closing specialists will support head judges in the closing process with a goal of streamlining efforts and getting results to the county office within 90 minutes of the 8 p.m. poll closings.
Still, Turner and Cartwright said a variety of circumstances, from increased write-in votes to incomplete documentation, can delay counts from an individual precinct or two.
