St. Louis County

The sun shines more brightly in St. Louis and Olmsted counties than in any of the seven counties in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, according to a recently completed nationwide evaluation of county Web sites by a group that advocates for transparency in government.

Norm Coleman’s campaign says a 100-vote increase for Al Franken overnight is suspicious and has filed a data practices act request to see paperwork related to voting in Mountain Iron, the St. Louis County town that saw Franken votes go from 406 to 506. MinnPost’s David Brauer called up that county’s director of elections, Paul Tynjala, to see what happened. Because St. Louis County is some 7,000 square miles, election officials called in their results election night and followed up the next day by delivering their voting machine tapes. It was the initial call, not the machine tape, that got the vote tally wrong — human, not mechanical, error.