ST PAUL, Minn. — For nearly a decade, Republican politicians have cast doubt on the integrity of the elections system in Minnesota and elsewhere. In the most recent KARE 11 MPR Star Tribune Minnesota poll, 21% of voters said they have low or no confidence the votes will be counted accurately.
But those most familiar with how it works say they've got high confidence that the count will be accurate and free of fraud.
"I have been hearing exactly the same arguments being made for the last 40 years," Joe Mansky, the state's preeminent elections expert, told KARE.
"The same allegations about voter fraud were made in the mid 1980s when our current voting technology was starting to emerge and replace the old lever voting machines and the punch card systems. There was no basis for them then, and there’s no basis for them now."
It was 40 years ago when a younger version of Joe Mansky began work with the Minnesota Secretary of State's office. His journey included time as the state's elections director, time working on redistricting and 17 years as the head of the Ramsey County / Saint Paul elections office.
Through the years local and state elections workers have improved safeguards against fraud, including the more recent attacks by hackers based in Russia and other parts of the world.
"I unplugged our system from the network after the 2012 presidential election because even back then I was concerned about the possibility for hacking to occur," Mansky said.
Nowadays it's standard practice to disconnect vote tabulating machines from the Internet while voting is in progress.
Counting accuracy
And when it comes to counting ballots, the machines have proven themselves time and time again to be more accurate than a hand count on election night.
"When I was out on the road counting literally hundreds of thousands of paper ballots, inevitably I would find an average of five vote-counting errors by the election judges for every thousand ballots," Mansky said.
Fast forward to the epic Coleman-Franken statewide recount of 2008, when optical scanning machines were in use. It was a very different story.
"The error rate there was two ballots for every 10,000 that we counted, an increase, an improvement of order of magnitude, which is incredible. So, going back to the hand counting is literally not only going back in time, but it's going in a direction that's not good for us."
Mansky has been asked about machine versus mankind several times since the Georgia Elections Board decided that ballots Nov. 5 must be counted by hand, due to distrust of the vote tabulating machines.
Minnesota law still requires a hand count for a recount event, but Mansky pointed out that's a far different situation than counting ballots by hand in polling places the day of an election. Minnesota recounts are done in centralized locations over a period of days, with attorneys, witnesses and campaign representatives watching closely for counting errors.
"The hand recount really allows us to verify the accuracy of the machine count before we certify the local results."
The paper ballot, is in fact, Minnesota's first defense against tampering with the equipment, according to Secretary of State Steve Simon, because it provides a backup. Those paper ballots must be stored for at least two years after an election.
"If there's some allegation, for example, that a machine got it wrong, or worse that someone got into machine and the machine was changing votes from candidate A to candidate B, you've got the record, you've got the receipts, you've got something you can touch and see and feel," Simon said.
State law requires every election office must run tests on the vote counting equipment before each primary and general election, and dictates those tests are open to the public.
"Anyone from the public can walk in off the street and watch as the election folks from that city or town or county, basically try to trick the equipment. They will sometimes try to crease the ballot, or they will put stray marks on it, or they will underline the name instead of filling in the oval."
Barriers to voter fraud
In the KARE 11 MPR Star Tribune Minnesota poll conducted in late September, only 50% of respondents agreed that mail-in voting is protected from fraud. In that poll, 38% of respondents said mail ballots are vulnerable to fraud and 12% weren't sure.
Simon and Mansky both pointed out that mail-in ballots go through a strict security protocol at the city and county level from the time they arrive through Election Day.
"Your ballot is sealed immediately upon you casting it and it remains that way until it gets processed," Mansky said. "The processing is done by two people who are of different political parties, so there is that built-in balance as a part of our system."
When it comes to voting in person, Minnesota's system makes it virtually impossible to double vote. The polling places now come with electronic poll books that are updated in real time, which prevents someone from voting in multiple locations or voting both absentee and in person.
"When I was Ramsey County's elections director the local prosecutor's conviction rate for voter fraud allegations was between two and three for every 100,000 votes," Mansky said.
Simon said those who have been caught in the past trying to vote twice have been cases of memory loss in which an elderly person with failing memory forgot they already voted absentee and try to vote again on election day.
Another high-profile case involved a woman who voted absentee on behalf of her daughter who was away at college without telling her. That created problems for the daughter when she showed up to vote in person in her college town.
Conservatives who oppose Minnesota's same-day registration system say it's vulnerable to fraud because you'll only find out after the fact if a person no longer lives where they say they do. Republicans point to the voter registration cards mailed out after the election that are returned as undeliverable, as proof those voters don't live there.
Mansky and Simon say all that proves is that the person may have moved since the election, or was temporarily living someplace else during the election and moved home.
"The post office used to tell me that here in Saint Paul, something like 16% of all the residents move at some time during the month," Mansky said.
Simon added, "That doesn’t mean they’re not an eligible voter. It just means in some cases they have temporarily or permanently moved, that’s not the all-purpose indicator that isn’t living where they should be living or voted where they shouldn’t be voting."
Former President Trump has raised the specter that non-citizens are voting, which is a felony. But it remains extremely rare in Minnesota.
A research study published last May by University of Saint Thomas professor Virgil Wiebe found that between 2015 and 2024 there were only three documented cases of noncitizens who tried to registering or vote, during a period in which more than 13 million votes were cast in Minnesota. All three were legal residents of the state that hadn't gained citizenship yet.
Undocumented immigrants can now get driver's licenses in Minnesota, which raised concerns they could be be added to the voting rolls automatically by the new automatic voter registration system for those who get licenses in the state.
But Simon said it's not that simple. Even immigrants who get driver’s licenses must prove citizenship to vote.
"Our system requires citizenship affirming documentation," Simon said. "So a passport, a birth certificate, naturalization papers. The idea is to expressly limit anybody who's not a citizen of the United States even getting into the pile of voter registrations."