MN Secretary of State: power outage caused no voting problems

The lights are back on at Dunning Recreation Center and Maxfield Magnet School. The two St. Paul polling locations were without power for less than two hours this morning after a truck capsized a utility poll at the intersection of Lexington Parkway and Interstate 94.

When I returned to Dunning around 2:30 this afternoon, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie just happened to be on the premises. He reports that the power outage caused no major headaches at the two locations. “It gave me a great comfort because I’m not in a state where you have to have electricity to run computers and all of that,” he said. “People could continue to vote on paper ballots.”

Ritchie also said that the power outage was the most significant glitch in voting he’s heard about so far today. “We’re 4,000-and-some local polling places,” he cautious, however. “We don’t hear from everybody all the time. … There are places with one-hour lines, an hour-and-a-half lines, but the weather is great. People have been incredibly helpful to each other. So far, so good.”

At Dunning all of the ballots filled out during the power outage were subsequently fed into the electronic ballot-counting machine. A Democrat and Republican poll observer monitored the process. Rebecca Rom, the DFL representative, says that there were roughly 500 such ballots. The process took awhile because of high voter turnout. “We were incredibly busy,” says Rom. “Just scores of new registrations. It’s been a crazy, noisy time with everybody very busy.”

(The GOP observer was no longer present at the site.)

Rom says there was one other controversy, when the Republican observer claimed that a single voter could vouch for the valid residency of only three other people. A call to the Secretary of State’s Office, however, revealed that it’s actually permissible to vouch for up to 15 residents. “She admitted her error,” Rom says of the GOP representative. “It ended up being fine.”