Vote count reporting errors in Scott, Sherburne ‘unfortunate’ but can happen, says elections systems expert

Minnesota House Democrats might be thinking the 2024 election could have been worse. And for a few hours on election night, it was.

Results posted on the Secretary of State’s website showed that two DFL incumbents were losing to GOP challengers, one by just four votes. A bit later, the results on the website had changed.

In House District 14B centered on St. Cloud, Rep. Dan Wolgamott saw that four-vote deficit reverse to a 28-vote victory over challenger Sue Ek. Within two days, that advantage had grown to 191 votes, which, in addition to being more comfortable, put the race outside the range of a taxpayer-funded recount.

By Friday, Wolgamott was introducing himself as “Danslide” after Gov. Tim Walz’ speech in Eagan.

The same night, results posted on the state results page showed that Rep. Brad Tabke had lost by 360 votes to GOP challenger Aaron Paul. Then, the vote totals were zeroed out and only in the early morning hours of Wednesday were results posted that showed Tabke with a 13-vote victory.

The tie was intact. And while House Republicans were pleased, they wondered what happened and what could have been. House GOP leader Lisa Demuth said “the errors and discrepancies we’ve seen this cycle are intolerable and unacceptable.” State GOP Chair David Hann demanded the secretary of state investigate the results in District 14B, claiming the actions in Sherburne County “destroys the trust Minnesotans have in the election process and raises serious questions.”

Related: How are votes certified in Minnesota? 

But the election night events in Scott and Sherburne counties, while unusual, are more likely a more-public-than-usual display of how the counting and reporting system is supposed to work. Errors occur and are corrected, said Max Hailperin a professor emeritus in computer science at Gustavus Adophus College who has developed an expertise in elections computer systems. The difference in Scott and Sherburne counties this election is that the errors and corrections occurred after results were reported to the state.

“The elections process, as a process, is designed to be much more resilient and free from errors than the individual actions within it,” Hailperin said. “We’re constantly making errors and we’re constantly catching errors and fixing them. It is because the process is designed with the recognition that humans carrying out complicated processes do err. So there is a lot of cross checking and a lot of double checking and a lot of redundancy.

“The trick is we try really hard to catch our errors and fix them before, rather than after, making anything public,” he said. “If you find yourself having to publicly correct and publicly revise you’re going to have a real hit to confidence, to people’s willingness to trust. The question is not just, do you catch your own mistakes, but do you catch your own mistakes before rather than after the curtain rises and people see what’s going on.

“That’s what went wrong in these two cases,” Hailperin said.

Hailperin, who became interested in elections systems after being asked to serve as an observer for a post-election review in 2010, has served on elections systems task forces and is an election judge for Hennepin County. He said he is confident in the final results in Districts 14B and 54A and estimated the chances that any recounts will reverse the results as “extremely low.”

What the counties say

After pulling results from the secretary of state’s results page election night, Scott County elections administrator Julie Hanson issued this statement: “There was a result upload that erroneously included partial results for precincts, which our system should have suppressed. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused and will rereport once counting is complete.”

Later in the week, Scott County Administrator Lezlie Vermillion said the county would “rescan” ballots that were part of “a single ballot distribution error on Monday, November 4 at the Public Works facility and a subsequent ballot scanning machine malfunction.”

The rescaning was completed shortly after midnight Saturday, and the updated results posted to the state results page increased Tabke’s lead from 13 votes to 14 votes. After the results are approved by the county canvassing board, candidates can request a recount. Because the results fall within one-half of 1%, the recount will be paid for by the county.

Scott County’s canvassing board meets Wednesday, and if a recount is requested by 5 p.m. Friday, it will be scheduled no later than Dec. 2. 

Sherburne County announced on Saturday that it would conduct a recount of votes cast in the county at its own expense, even though the final unofficial results are outside the one-half of 1% margin that would require taxpayer funding of the work.

District 14B covers three counties — Stearns, Benson and Sherburne. While the GOP and losing challenger Ek could request a recount in the other counties, they would have to reimburse those counties for the work.

Related: Election 2024 voting timeline and key dates in Minnesota explained 

Sherburne’s public statement rejected “rumors” that ballots were lost or found.

“All ballots cast in the general election were properly and legally received, documented, counted and chain of custody maintained,” the statement said. “Some ballot totals failed to upload to the Secretary of State’s website on election night.”

The county explains the problems like this: The ballots that failed to load were mail-in ballots received by 8 p.m. election night. They had been accepted by the bipartisan ballot board and were properly processed, counted and included in the printed and electronic counts — counts known as summary statements or “tapes.”

It was the process of uploading these tabulations to the state where problems occurred, the county stated. It cited an “improperly cleared or partially damaged memory card that did not fully collect and transmit results from some of the processed mail-in ballots. The same memory card transmitted “test” data meant to test the reporting system prior to the election.

“The result was inflated vote totals that later decreased once the error was discovered and corrected,” the county stated. Attempts to correct the reporting error election night failed and wrong numbers remained. Elections staff discovered the error while comparing the local summary statements with the numbers on the state site — part of the regular process of checking numbers. They then contacted the state and the candidates and uploaded accurate results.

Sherburne County’s canvassing board met Tuesday to certify the results. It is awaiting a formal recount request from Ek. 

Related: Secretary of State Steve Simon: Minnesota vote was high turnout, low drama 

Hailperin said the explanations from both counties seem plausible and fit within the procedures he is familiar with and that follow state law. The tabulators are not connected to the internet, so when results need to be transferred to the state, they must first be loaded onto a removable storage device like a thumb drive from which they are then uploaded to the state. It was a damaged thumb drive that caused problems in Sherburne, but the actual results were maintained on other computer equipment.

Hailperin also said fatigue and pressure can lead to errors. He said his Election Day was 18 and a half hours and imagined the workers in Scott and Sherburne had similar work days.

“It’s a very intense thing,” he said. “It’s really unfortunate, but it is the result of an attempt to be very transparent. The release of results at the earliest possible moment is an exercise in transparency. The price we pay for that is that sometimes errors get detected afterward, rather than beforehand.”

And a change in state law that required elections officials to count ballots received by 8 p.m. election night rather than the previous deadline of 3 p.m. only intensified the pressure to report results because it compacted the timelines.

Do recounts change results?

While recounts can change some of the totals, they rarely change who won. The scanners that tabulate ballots are very accurate and recounts usually center around ballots the scanners can’t properly read because they contain ballots that were incorrectly marked. That is, a voter voted for two candidates in a race or appears to have not voted for anyone because they didn’t properly fill in the bubbles on ballots.

Voters who slide their own ballots into readers are informed of overvotes and are given a chance to re-mark their ballots. Most mailed ballots with undervotes or overvotes, however, remain uncounted unless a race is recount-close.

Hailperin said he has served as an election judge on recounts and said the job is to decide if a voter’s ballot marking provides enough information to reveal the intent of that voter. That is, if a voter circled a name instead of filling in the oval next to the candidate’s name or voted for two candidates and then crossed one name off, those votes are counted in a recount.

“You could easily have 10 new votes that are discovered in the course of your recount,” he said. “It’s fairly routine that there will be a change. It’s just not a large change and it’s a change that typically balances out.”

One of the most high-profile recount cases in Minnesota history that resulted in changes in both vote totals and the winner was the 2008 U.S. Senate race between Republican incumbent Norm Coleman and Democratic challenger Al Franken. The initial unofficial results showed Coleman had won by 215 votes. But after a hand recount and legal challenges, including over improperly rejected absentee ballots, officials determined Franken had won by 225 votes.

MinnPost archive: The day the recount ended and the fight turned into something really nice

Peter Callaghan

Peter Callaghan covers state government for MinnPost. Follow him on Twitter @CallaghanPeter or email him at pcallaghan@minnpost.com.

The post Vote count reporting errors in Scott, Sherburne ‘unfortunate’ but can happen, says elections systems expert appeared first on MinnPost.