How are votes certified in Minnesota?

With nearly 1,175,000 absentee votes already accepted in Minnesota, it is important to look at how votes get certified and the differences between states. 

The role of certifying the votes is not to verify the final vote count, but to sign off on the comprehensive election verification process that’s already been conducted through the canvassing process, according to Protect Democracy. And it starts at the county level. 

Step-by-step effort

Minnesota has 87 counties, and all of them have to canvass the election. On election night, election officials officially report what are considered unofficial results after the votes are tabulated, according to Secretary of State Steve Simon. 

A few days after the Nov. 5 election, counties hold canvassing board reviews and make official all the numbers that they have in by then. This is the point the county results go from being unofficial to official, according to Simon. The State Canvassing Board meets Nov. 21, which Simon said is in the Minnesota Constitution. The state’s board consists of five members and includes Simon as secretary of state and four members he appoints: two state Supreme Court justices and two district court judges. The five-member panel certifies the results from the 87 counties. 

But the process doesn’t end there. 

“Just because we had the meeting of the Canvassing Board and certify the election results, that doesn’t mean a citizen or a group can’t challenge the results of the election,” Simon said. “They can.” 

Simon said a number of things can happen after the state votes get certified, including the possibility of an election “contest” being filed. This means someone can disagree with the outcome or can think there is some evidence of wrongdoing or an error. 

Recounting ballots is a process used to determine the vote count between two candidates where the margin is extremely close, according to the secretary of state’s website. If ballots are recounted, a candidate may disagree with the election official’s determination of voter intent on a ballot and can challenge the ballots. These challenged ballots then go to the appropriate Canvassing Board for review and a decision.

While Simon said it is relatively rare for results to be contested, state law says if the margin in a particular race is close enough, the losing candidate can ask for a taxpayer-financed recount. 

For a statewide election, if the votes are within one-quarter of 1%, the state will pay for a recount if it’s requested by the candidate. If it’s more than that margin, Simon said the candidate or campaign could still request a recount, but they have to pay for it themselves. He added that for legislative races the threshold is one-half of 1%. 

“I always tell people when it comes to recounts, again, that’s just the…taxpayer-paid one,” Simon said. “Technically, someone could lose a statewide election by a million votes and say, ‘I want a recount.’ They’re very unlikely to be successful, but if they want to pay for it, they can do that.”

National challenges lead to new state law

In the 2020 election, counties in states such as Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona refused to certify election results. 

“They just sat on them,” Simon said. “They said that they had a feeling or a hunch or a vibe that something was off. This wasn’t the result of any sort of finding by a court of hearing or anything like that.”

Simon said that set off alarms in Minnesota. He added that although he had no notion of any such plan then or now that the same thing could happen in Minnesota, the Legislature passed a law that effectively addresses the possibility. 

“If someone had a problem or a hunch or a vibe or anything, the place to do that is in the court, not by getting a sympathetic county commissioner or someone at the county level to sit on a result because of a vibe or a whim,” Simon said. 

The new Minnesota law reads, “Upon completion of the postelection review, the postelection review official must immediately report the results to the county auditor. The county auditor must then immediately submit the results of the postelection review electronically or in writing to the secretary of state.” 

Simon said that although Minnesota didn’t face the problem in 2020, it was necessary to play the long game and be prepared for future elections. 

However, in 2024, there are already national examples of election board members refusing to certify results. For example, two members of the county board in Fulton, Georgia, refused to certify their primary election in March. 

Meanwhile, in Virginia, some officials are already contesting the voting system ahead of the Nov. 5 election, saying voting machines are not verifiable.

Simon said the Minnesota law is not intended to shut down someone who thinks something wrong happened but encourages people to do it in the right place, such as a court, and not at the county level. He added that it’s critical to make sure the candidate with the most votes at the time of the canvassing board would be certified as the winner. 

“Every state’s different,” Simon said. “Obviously under the Constitution this is a responsibility delegated to the states, and every state’s political culture and history is different.” 

Certification calendar 

Each state has a different local and state certification deadline for the votes. Minnesota’s local voter certification is due Nov. 13, while the state deadline is Nov. 21. 

Every state’s canvassing board meets at a different date, usually in late November or early December, but every state must issue a certificate of ascertainment by Dec. 10. The certificate of ascertainment is the official document that lists the names of the electors chosen by the votes and the number of votes received.  

“It’s a fancy way of saying we have ascertained the winner, we have notified the electors and the alternates pledged to that winner, that they are to show up in a week to cast their electoral votes for the candidates that they’re pledged to,” Simon said. 

On Dec. 17, electors representing the winning presidential and vice presidential candidates from each state meet for ceremonies in their state capitals to sign certifications of their votes. 

How early voting affects certification 

Simon said Monday that 1,174,224 Minnesota voters had already cast ballots, making it likely the state would surpass the percentage of votes cast by mail at early voting centers in 2022, when 26% of the vote was cast this way. A much higher percentage — 58% — voted outside traditional polls in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic and special laws that encouraged staying out of physical polling places.

“If you’re looking at presidential election years, 2020 was a definite outlier for early voting because it was COVID and in Minnesota, and every place I’m aware of in the country, there was a massive, I mean, really massive increase in absentee voting because it was COVID and people wanted to avoid congregating in places with a lot of people, whether it was the grocery store or a polling place,” Simon said. 

Simon said Minnesota law says absentee votes have to be in by Election Day, specifically when the polls close at 8 p.m. He added if someone wants to vote by mail, they have the responsibility to make sure their ballot is returned to their local election office by Election Day by mailing, hand-delivering or having a trusted person deliver it. 

“Yes, sometimes it’s not until the wee hours in the morning that we get all the counties to report,” Simon said. “And maybe there’s a glitch in a particular county, but in Minnesota, I think we’re really fortunate in that those issues don’t affect certification, because everything’s got to be in by Election Day. And with very rare exceptions, by certainly dawn the next morning.”

Other states are not the same. In states such as California or Mississippi, the rule is to get the absentee ballot postmarked by Election Day. Ballots that arrive days or a week after can still be counted. 

“We don’t have that rule, so I don’t know how they handle that in those states,” Simon said. “Frankly, I can imagine that being a tricky certification process.”

Editor’s note: Amelia Roessler wrote this for MinnPost. This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

This article first appeared on MinnPost and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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