ST PAUL, Minn. — Minnesota's website providing online services for voters experienced a brief outage on Saturday morning, just days ahead of the November general election.
According to a spokesperson from the Secretary of State's office, a "hardware issue" affected some online tools, including the ability for voters to check the status of their absentee ballots. That functionality appeared to be restored by mid-morning.
The spokesperson also noted that a planned outage of their website and online tools would occur around 3 p.m. that was expected to last between 15 and 30 minutes. The services have since been restored.
Interest in ballot tracking has increased since a federal court ruling on Thursday, which cast doubt on whether late-arriving absentee ballots would count in the 2020 election. The state had originally set a seven-day extension for absentee ballots to arrive at county election offices following the election; however, the court ordered any ballots received after Nov. 3 to be separated and potentially removed from any vote totals.
Since the order, Secretary of State Steve Simon has encouraged Minnesotans to check the status of any recently mailed ballots, and to consider dropping off ballots at their county election office or voting in person to ensure their ballot is received.
The Secretary of State's spokesperson told KARE 11 that the Saturday morning outage also affected some functionality for the Statewide Voter Registration System (SVRS); however, the state has a "process for administering absentee ballots when SVRS is unavailable, so voters should still be able to cast an absentee ballot today."
Voters are able to cast an absentee ballot in-person through early in-person voting at county election offices through Monday, Nov. 2.
RELATED: How to track your vote in MN
The spokesperson did not give a reason for the hardware problem that caused the outage.
Get more information about voting in the 2020 election in our KARE 11 Voter's Toolkit:
If you have questions about the 2020 election, text your question to our KARE to Vote team at 763-797-7215.
