City elections staff members are looking for ways to cut back on their work in Edina, one of just a handful of Minnesota cities that hold an election every year.
City Council and mayoral elections in the west-metro suburb are held in even years; in odd years, the Edina school board contracts with the city to run school board elections. As election work has piled up, particularly since the pandemic popularized absentee voting, Edina Assistant City Manager Lisa Schaefer said the three people in the city clerk's office have less time for everything else they have to do.
"Over time, elections have been more difficult to absorb," Schaefer said.
Administering a primary and general election can take up to six months of near-complete focus from city staff members, Schaefer said, from preparing to mail ballots to calibrating voting machines and processing ballots when they return. Heightened security around voting equipment has made everything more time-consuming.
The Edina school district has contracted with the city to run its elections since the 1980s, Schaefer said. It made sense decades ago, she said, but the arrangement has chafed as elections take more time and resources to manage.
The school district gets billed for city staff time and other easily measured costs. But Schaefer said it's hard to account for the costs of office space, staff burnout and tasks that don't get done during election season, such as council business, responding to data requests and managing city records.
The contract caps the bill at $150,000, which Schaefer said was easily exceeded during the 2021 election.
Most Minnesota cities and school districts align their elections, so election workers run one primary and one general election every other year. According to the Secretary of State's office, only about one in every 10 cities and school districts have misaligned election years.
