Minnesota GOP scores victory in challenge to who will review absentee ballots in Hennepin County

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. (AP) — 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 choose new members to a board that validates absentee ballots .

In an order issued late Tuesday, the court said officials in Hennepin County — home to Minneapolis and many of its suburbs — had a duty to appoint election judges from the party’s list before cities could choose from them and limit the number of available exhaust people. The court gave the province until Friday to comply.

So far, the county’s absentee voting board has been filled by four Democrats and one Republican.

Minnesota started in-person early and absentee voting on September 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 had already received. More than 209,000 of those ballots have been accepted by the current review board.

The Republican Party of Minnesota and an allied group, the Minnesota Voters Alliance, the court requested to intervene after it was determined that no one on the Republican Party’s list of more than 1,500 volunteers had been appointed to the absentee voting board in Hennepin County. The volunteers came from counties statewide and their names were submitted to the Secretary of State’s Office earlier this year. The Democratic Party in Minnesota has submitted its own slate to the office, and election judges must be chosen from both parties’ rosters.

The absentee polling board consists of five election judges and several deputy county auditors. Hennepin County officials said in a lawsuit that 40 of the county’s 45 cities appoint their own election judges and have their own absentee polling places.

County officials said the localities exhausted the list of available election judges before Hennepin County could fill its own absentee voting board. The county had more than 6,000 election judge vacancies to fill. They said they used the authority they thought they had under state law to appoint board members who were not on the list submitted to the secretary of state.

Secretary of State Steve Simon argued in a lawsuit that the county had complied with state law, but the Supreme Court disagreed. It said the county should start with names submitted by political parties to fill polling place seats, although the decision did not specifically say how many Republicans or how many Democrats should be appointed.

According to county documents, the absentee ballot office processes and counts all ballots submitted through the U.S. mail, through in-person absentee voting in the district court in Minneapolis, or submitted to one of the non-hometown communities.

State GOP Chairman David Hann called Tuesday’s court decision “a huge victory for election integrity in Minnesota” and said all counties should be aware.

“The Court’s order made clear that there is no ambiguity in the law – Hennepin County cannot bypass the party’s roster of election judges,” Hann said in a statement.

Hennepin County Auditor Daniel Rogan said in a statement that the county would send emails Thursday to individuals on the list to recruit election judges for the absentee polling place. He said the Supreme Court’s ruling was made on limited grounds, pointing out that the court recognized that the board was operating with sufficient party balance as required by state law.

The Office of the Secretary of State said in a statement that the ruling “provided clarity on a technical and previously ambiguous picture” and will not delay 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 follow the proper process in filling out absentee ballots, but that they did not rule out the possibility of problems elsewhere. They said they looked at Hennepin County first because of its size.

Hennepin County election officials already came under criticism earlier this month after a private courier vehicle collecting ballots from several communities was left unattended with its trunk open for several minutes outside Edina City Hall. The county said surveillance video showed no one had tampered with the sealed ballot boxes, all ballots had been processed and no new ballots had been entered.

The courier company fired the driver.