Updated: 2:04 p.m.
A steady stream of Minnesota voters are heading to the polls Tuesday to elect a president and a U.S. senator, decide several closely watched races for the U.S. House, and determine party control of the Minnesota Legislature for the next two years.
Polls in Minnesota are open until 8 p.m. (As long as voters are in line by 8 p.m., they will be able to vote.) So far, there haven’t been any reports of widespread problems.
"So far we're getting good reports about operation of equipment, good reports about election judge training,” said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon. “No reports, fortunately, about any major disruptions or fights or disputes at polling places.”
Simon said there have been some scattered power outages, but that they appeared to have been resolved relatively quickly.
In Hennepin County, Elections Manager Ginny Gelms said that overall, things are going smoothly, but that it's not uncommon to see hiccups with ballot machines not working intermittently in a county of its size with 421 polling places open Tuesday.
In the Twin Cities north metro, Alisianna Ruiz was in line early in Blaine. She said she isn’t worried about mail-in voting but cast her ballot Tuesday because feels empowered on Election Day.
"I want to make sure my voice matters, my vote counts,” Ruiz said, who is supporting Joe Biden. “It definitely a different type of environment in this election. You know there have been one or two where I haven't voted. I'll never make that mistake again."
In Frohn Township in northern Minnesota, Fritzy Nipp said she voted in person because it’s “the American way.”
“I’ve had to vote absentee before and you just don’t get the same feeling,” said Nipp, who is supporting President Donald Trump for reelection.
1.8 million early votes cast
For many Minnesota voters, their Election Day has already come and gone — more than 1.8 million have already cast their ballots, according to Simon. That represents 62 percent of all votes cast in 2016.
As of Monday night, about 297,500 absentee ballots, and ballots from mail-only precincts, had not yet been submitted, though some of the remaining unsubmitted ballots could have been in transit or they could belong to voters who have decided to vote in person on Election Day instead.
Photos: Voting across Minnesota
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The fate of in-transit ballots was thrown into doubt by a recent federal court ruling that said tardy ballots — ones postmarked by Election Day but arriving after Tuesday — could eventually be removed from vote totals. Officials must segregate ballots that come in late pending additional litigation.
Simon has said local elections officials plan to count ballots that arrive through Nov. 10.
“We’ll do as the court has ordered and segregate the ballots," he said. "But we are going to count and tally every last vote for every last office.”
Lake of the Woods County is one of the only parts of the state whose election process hasn't changed at all. It's rural, sparsely populated and as far north as you can get without crossing into Canada. And for the last 30 years, 15 of its 17 voting precincts have been mail-in only.
The two in-person polling places are in Baudette. County Auditor Lorene Hanson said about two-thirds of the roughly 2,000 registered voters automatically vote by mail. This year, they got a few hundred extra absentee ballots from Baudette, but not enough to tax their counting process.
"This is a stressful election for some counties," she said. "It's new for them. We've been doing this since the '90s."
While election officials in some states say they'll be counting ballots for days, Minnesota should expect relatively speedy results.
State elections officials started counting a couple of weeks ago. Simon said that will allow Minnesota to be among the first states to report accurate results.
"They really appreciated and made use of the two-week head start that we had to Minnesota for counting absentee ballots and so I suspect that tonight after polls close, the numbers that are reported will reflect all or substantially all of the absentee ballots that have come in so far, either by mail or people who voted in person absentee."
Anxiety high this Election Day
In downtowns ranging from New York to Denver to Minneapolis, workers boarded up businesses lest the vote lead to unrest of the sort that broke out earlier this year amid protests over racial inequality.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Justice posted 14 federal monitors in Minneapolis to respond to any attempts to restrict voter rights. The city is one of 44 jurisdictions across the country where the DOJ has sent monitoring teams this year.
The Rev. Eric Hoffer on de-escalating Election Day tension, intimidation
by Cathy WurzerIn the Twin Cities metro area, a group of faith leaders is organizing to try to dispel tension at the polls. They're planning "rapid response teams" ready to travel to wherever they hear reports of unrest or intimidation.
Should credible threats arise, "we will in small groups go to those various polling places as needed throughout the day and assess the situation and do what we can to de-escalate the threat," said the Rev. Eric Hoffer of Salem Lutheran Church in north Minneapolis.
"We are hoping that simply by being a nonanxious presence and hopefully putting some space between the agitators and the voters ... we can lower the temperature of the situation and possibly even stop the agitation if needed.”
In Corcoran, a Hennepin County elections official said a voter came to the polling place wearing campaign materials. An election judge asked the voter to remove the material and he complied.
"Apparently some other voter got the impression that that person was there to intimidate other voters, but that person really was a voter who was hanging out in the polling place waiting to place their ballot into the ballot counter," Gelms, the county’s elections manager, said.
Will the streak hold?
While Minnesota isn’t considered a critical swing state, it has received plenty of presidential attention this year.
The state had a surprisingly tight finish four years ago, with Democrat Hillary Clinton edging Republican Donald Trump by about 45,000 votes of the 3 million cast.
It’s given Republicans hope of snapping Minnesota’s long Democratic win streak at 11 consecutive presidential contests in the blue column. Democrat Joe Biden has visited the state twice during the campaign this fall, while Trump has held several large rallies in Duluth, Bemidji and Rochester.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Correction (Nov. 3, 2020): Alisianna Ruiz’s name was misspelled in an earlier version of this story.
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