Minnehaha County completed vote counting 20 hours after polls closed

As polls closed in South Dakota on Tuesday night, the long task of counting hundreds of thousands of votes began across the state.

By Wednesday afternoon, 65 of the state’s 66 counties had completed their full count.

But in a windowed room on the third floor of the Minnehaha County Administration Building, counting machines whirred as election officials continued the task they’d been doing all night.

“This is pure volume,” Minnehaha County Auditor Leah Anderson said shortly before 11 a.m. Wednesday.

According to her, turnout in the district was high: at some polling stations it was 80%. And there were a large number of absentee ballots, which she said require a more complex counting process than Election Day ballots.

As of Wednesday morning, absentee votes were still being counted in Precinct 04-16, the largest in the county. It wasn’t until shortly after 3:00 pm that day that the full results were finally released: 66,941 ballots and 28,707 absentee ballots had been cast on election day, for a voter turnout of 61.91%.

Anderson said for a while Tuesday night that the county’s four voting machines were split evenly to count absentee and Election Day ballots, but on Wednesday morning they switched to using three of them for Election Day voting as absentee voting began slow down their work.

Indeed, by 2 p.m., the county’s election results website showed that all Election Day votes had been counted and reported, while only 17 of the county’s 81 precincts had fully counted and reported absentee votes.

Statewide, by comparison, in Pennington County — South Dakota’s second-largest county — County Auditor Cindy Mohler said her staff completed the count around 5 a.m. Wednesday.

They counted 57,555 ballots, compared to 95,648 in Minnehaha County. But the total number of absentee votes in Pennington County, which has only three counting machines, was actually higher at 29,300 votes.

Mohler agreed that absentees, with their need to turn around because of longer ballots this election, were causing some of the problems.

“They love to litter our cars,” she said.

Deputies are unhappy with the speed of vote counting

Even by Tuesday evening, the slow vote count in Minnehaha County was raising eyebrows among some county residents.

“It’s a shame that in the state of Florida we have 98% of the votes counted and we have virtually nothing from Minnehaha County.” wrote District 13 Representative Tony VenhuizenRepublican, on X, formerly known as Twitter. “We need to fix this.”

10th District Rep. Erin Healey, a Democrat, This was stated in a Facebook post on Wednesday. that she wanted to express her disappointment about the “unacceptable delay in the Minnehaha County vote count,”

“There is simply no reason why ballots cannot be processed accurately and in a timely manner, and these delays undermine confidence in our election process,” she wrote.

Healy continued by saying that “this situation has made it clear that it is time for Leah Anderson to resign.”

Anderson responded by saying that they had spoken earlier in the day and that Healy had been “very cordial”.

“We talked about what the situation was,” Anderson said in response. “She seemed to understand the process when we spoke on the phone today.”

15th District Rep. Kadin Wittman, a Democrat, made a similar Facebook post for Healey on Wednesday, although she did not directly call for Anderson’s resignation.

“Our community needs leaders who can carry out essential responsibilities reliably and transparently,” Wittman said.

This will be the second call for Anderson’s resignation this year. The first came from an elected official next to Commissioner Joe Kippley: who in September called the auditor a “walking lawsuit.” The moment was perhaps the most significant series of collisions between commission and Anderson, who, according to Kippley, in her time at work supplied “useful idiocy to election conspiracy scammers.”

Among the conflicts was Anderson saying she’s not sure she can trust the county’s voting system. And expressing concern that the algorithm may alter absentee ballots. She also joined a local election integrity group to ask the county sheriff a question to investigate what they called a “voter registration drive-through scheme” involving voters registered at places like mail forwarding services.

Both US Department of Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota were present Tuesday in Minnehaha County.

Although the ACLU cited a challenge to the June primary election results that local and state officials said it went beyond state law The Justice Department did not specify why they had federal election observers as a reason for their presence.

“We’ve been working on the smoke for 45 days now.”

Asked to respond to people wondering how the count could continue, Anderson responded, “If they’re wondering how it could have taken so long, they might actually want to step up and become one of our employees.”

Anderson said that while the machines may encounter some problems (one got stuck overnight, requiring a court order to allow them to reopen a sealed ballot box to count some ballots), many other factors are at play in the ever-lengthening vote count. .

The county auditor added that she would like to see changes to state laws regarding voting. She called the 45-day window for early voting “pretty extensive,” saying it puts a strain on her staff for a significant period of time in the run-up to the election as they routinely stay late to check absentee ballots.

Anderson also said that after early voting ended at 5 p.m. the day before Election Day, the process was extremely fast, requiring even more work.

“We’ve been working on the smoke for 45 days now,” Anderson said.

In Minnehaha County, vote counting has long stretched out for days after an election. Former County Auditor Bob Litz was regularly criticized on this issue during his ten years in office by the Argus Leader editorial board. suggesting that the Minnehaha County Commission ask him to resign after the 2014 general election.

In his last election in November 2020, the count also ended the day after the election—and shortly before Litz sent out a press release saying he tested positive for COVID-19 after hours of speaking with dozens of election workers and media outlets.

The campaigning is expected to take place on Friday.