Power outage at two St. Paul polling places

Shortly after 8 a.m. a truck plowed into a telephone pole at the intersection of Lexington Parkway and Interstate 94 in St. Paul. The collision knocked out power in the surrounding area, including at two polling locations, Dunwoody Dunning Recreation Center and Maxfield Magnet School.

I stopped by Dunwoody around 9:30 a.m. to see how the blackout was affecting voting. According to chief election judge Patrick Dempsey, the outage had not caused any significant problems. “We have our back-up procedures in place and they’ve been invoked,” he said. Ballots are being collected in emergency holders. They’ll then be fed through the electronic ballot-counting machines once power is restored. Dempsey expected the lights to be back on within the hour. I’ll stop by later today to see if the problem’s been cleared up.

Patrick Dempsey

Nearby Central High School was evacuated.