Minneapolis expects smoother voting, quicker results after changes

Minneapolis voters who go to the polls on Tuesday should see fewer delays than last year.

Elections officials say they expect elections to run smoothly because the city has made changes designed to reduce long lines and confusion at polling places that troubled some voters in the 2012 election.

The city will also use a new voting system they say will shorten the process of tallying ranked-choice ballots.

In 2009, the first time the city used ranked-choice voting, some races weren't tallied until two weeks after election night because the ballots had to be counted by hand. The new system eliminates the need for a hand count.

Freeman, Craft, McGregor Group, a Florida-based firm that advises states on the accuracy and security of voting methods, tested the new system of voting machines and software and found it tabulated results accurately. • Read the audit report

The machines also have been certified by the Secretary of State's Office. City Council Member Cam Gordon, who is running for re-election, said he's relieved the audit came out fine.

"I was a little nervous about it because these are new machines," Gordon said. "We'd done some of our own testing and demonstration so I had some confidence. But whenever there's an independent audit coming in, doing an analysis — it was wonderful to see the good news."

Voters will have 35 mayoral candidates to choose from, and all 13 City Council seats are on the ballots.

The auditors based their conclusions on a test of more than 20,000 ballots. City officials haven't offered predictions for this year's turnout.

City Clerk Casey Carl said the last time there was an open mayor's seat in an election, the turnout was around 47 percent.

Carl said the new voting system handles the two most time-consuming tasks election workers had to perform in 2009: the hand count and manually entering that data into a spreadsheet. The new equipment features a program that will automatically place first, second and third choice votes into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.

Freeman, Craft, McGregor Group auditors said the system's export function was "easy to use and requires no special setup."

Auditors cautioned the spreadsheets may be inaccurate if an election worker doesn't include all the ballot data in the report. However, they said that error can be "readily detected by comparing the number of cast vote records represented in the file to the number of ballots tabulated in a given contest."

City officials say the new system should allow voters to know who the winners are in next week's municipal elections faster than they did in 2009.

However, Carl said it may still take a few days to determine the winners of close contests. To be a declared winner on Election Night, a candidate must receive enough first choice votes to clear the 50 percent threshold.

Carl said people can check early results on the Secretary of State's website. But he said it will not declare winners.

"They are simply going to upload in real time the data for all three rankings in each race and that's it," he said. "And there's a disclaimer that says, 'see the city's website for more detail.'"

Carl said the city will post final results at vote.minneapolismn.gov when they become available. He expects winners in all races to be declared by the end of next week.

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