MINNEAPOLIS — The Minnesota Supreme Court has ordered election officials in the state's most populous county to go back to a list submitted by the state's Republican Party and pick new members for a board that validates absentee ballots.
In an order handed down late Tuesday, the court said officials in Hennepin County — home to Minneapolis and many of its suburbs — had a duty to appoint election judges off the party's list before letting cities pick from it and exhaust the number of people available. The court gave the county until Friday to comply.
Until now the county absentee ballot board had been filled by four Democrats and one Republican.
Minnesota began in-person early voting and absentee balloting on Sept. 20. Tuesday's Supreme Court order, signed by Chief Justice Natalie Hudson, did not invalidate any of the more than 263,000 absentee ballots the county already received. More than 209,000 of those ballots have been accepted by the current review board.
Absentee ballot boards consist of a panel of at least two persons who decide whether to accept or reject the ballots by comparing the information on the voter's absentee ballot application form with the information they write in the outer ballot envelope, often referred to as the signature envelope.
Board members check to see if the ID information matches. Voters are allowed to use their driver's license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number. Sometimes voters forget which unique number they used on the form, which creates an innocent mismatch.
In those cases, the absentee ballot board must check to see if the signature on the application form matches the one on the ballot outer envelope. The ID match can be done by both partisan election judges and deputy county auditors, but for the signature match function there must be at least one judge from each party.
"I’m 100 percent confident the absentee ballot boards working till now had party balance, in fact, the Supreme Court said that in their order," Ginny Gelms, Hennepin County Elections Director, told reporters Wednesday.
But the high court ruled simply having party balance wasn't enough to meet to requirement of the law as interpreted in previous rulings. In other words, placing a Republican election judge on an absentee ballot board for a signature match wasn't sufficient. Hennepin County must use a Republican election judge from the list of of names provided by the Republican Party, before appointing other Republicans.
"My interpretation of the statute and how it applied to absentee ballot board was different, but I respect the Supreme Court and we’re going to do what they told us to do," Gelms explained.
Gelms said she previously sent the GOP list -- which numbered 1,500 names -- to the city election offices throughout Hennepin County because they'll need more than 6,000 election judges for Tuesday's election. But now that the Supreme Court has ordered Gelms to use people from the party's list for signature matches, she will comply.
"That’s part of it too, trying to work with our city elections partners to make sure we’re not poaching election judges from them. But we’re complying with the court order and we will do what we need to do."
According to Gelms only about 50 ballot envelopes per week required a signature match, because most people don't make a mistake on the ID numbers they provide. Hennepin County has already accepted 209,000 absentee ballots, a number that includes both mail-in ballots and early voting in person.
Voter's Alliance Lawsuit
The Republican Party of Minnesota and an allied group, the Minnesota Voters Alliance, petitioned the court to intervene after determining that nobody on the Republican Party list of more than 1,500 volunteers had been appointed to Hennepin County’s absentee ballot board.
The volunteers were drawn from counties statewide and their names submitted to the Secretary of State's Office earlier this year. The Democratic Party in Minnesota submitted its own list to the office, and election judges are supposed to be selected from both parties' rosters.
The absentee ballot board is made up of five election judges and several deputy county auditors. Hennepin County officials said in a court filing that 40 of the 45 cities across the county appoint their own election judges and have their own absentee ballot boards.
County officials said the localities exhausted the list of available election judges before Hennepin County could fill its own absentee ballot board. The county had over 6,000 election judge positions to fill. They said they used the authority they believed they had under state law to name board members who weren't on the list submitted to the Secretary of State's Office.
Secretary of State Steve Simon argued in a court filing that the county had complied with state law, but the Supreme Court disagreed. It said the county must start with names submitted by the political parties to fill ballot board seats, though its order did not specifically say how many Republicans or how many Democrats should be appointed.
According to the county's filing, the absentee ballot board processes and counts all absentee ballots submitted through the U.S. mail, via in-person absentee voting at the county courthouse in Minneapolis, or submitted to one of the communities that lack their own board.
State GOP chair David Hann called Tuesday's court decision “a huge win for election integrity in Minnesota” and said all counties should be on notice.
“The Court’s order made clear that there is no ambiguity in the law — Hennepin County cannot bypass the Party’s list of election judges,” Hann said in a statement.
Hennepin County Auditor Daniel Rogan said in a statement that the county would send emails to individuals on the list Thursday to recruit election judges for the absentee ballot board. He said the Supreme Court ruling was made on narrow grounds, and pointed out that the court recognized that the board was operating with sufficient party balance as required by state law.
The Secretary of State’s Office said in a statement that the ruling “provided clarity on a technical and previously ambiguous statue” and won’t delay the ongoing absentee ballot verification processes.
Hann and other Republicans said at a news conference earlier this month that they knew of no other counties that had failed to comply with the proper process in filling absentee ballot boards, but that they weren't ruling out the possibility of problems elsewhere. They said they started by looking at Hennepin County because of its size.
Hennepin County elections officials had already come under criticism after a private courier's vehicle picking up absentee ballots from several communities was left unattended with the trunk open outside Edina City Hall for several minutes earlier this month. The county said security video showed that nobody tampered with the sealed ballot cases inside, that all of the ballots had been accounted for, and that no new ballots had been slipped in.
The courier company fired the driver.