Minnesota leads nation in voter turnout — at least for now

Minnesota and neighboring Wisconsin are battling it out to see which state will claim the honor of having the highest voter turnout during the 2024 election.

The North Star State on Monday was in the lead by a whisker, said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, but the final result won’t be known for a week or two as vote totals in each state are still being finalized and ballots verified.

More than 3,272,000 Minnesotans cast ballots on Nov. 5 or during the early and absentee voting period, or 76.3% of eligible voters, Simon said.

Simon attributed Minnesota’s strong showing to the state’s “pro-voting culture” and longstanding laws that allow for same-day registration and the ability to vote from home.

The fact that Gov. Tim Walz appeared on the ballot as the running mate for Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris may have played a role, too, Simon said.

“It was an intense election with high stakes,” Simon said. From an administrative perspective, “we wanted high turnout and low drama, and we got both.”

Simon said Minnesota was an “oasis of calm” with no reports of threats, intimidation or harassment against election officials or poll workers who staffed more than 3,000 polling places.

Final tallies in Wisconsin could push the Badger State ahead of Minnesota, Simon said. But for now, Minnesota was ahead.

Election officials in all 87 counties in Minnesota have begun the process of checking results for accuracy. Required by law, officials will manually count ballots of randomly selected precincts and compare results with those tabulated by electronic voting machines.

In Hennepin County, that included checking results in 12 precincts chosen in a lottery, and verifying the results of three races in each. In total, 30 election judges with observers and the public watching from across the table will comb through 23,428 ballots to ensure vote totals match up, said Ginny Gelms, elections director for Hennepin County. Each ballot will be reviewed three times, once for the presidential race, once for the U.S. Senate race and once for the U.S. House of Representatives race.

The process started Monday morning and may take two days, Gelms said.

“Today is a reminder that the 2024 election process is not over yet,” Simon said. “The mandatory reviews are a critical safeguard to ensure accuracy.”

Discrepancies in vote totals are rare, officials said. In that case, additional precincts in the count would be audited, Gelms said.