Minneapolis hand-counting hums along: 1st tallies to be released Wednesday

First tallies from some City Council and Park Board races are expected Wednesday.

Last update: November 9, 2009 - 9:46 PM

Ballot counting by hand is going faster than expected in Minneapolis, but the first tallies from last week's instant-runoff elections won't be released until Wednesday, according to interim Election Director Patrick O'Connor.

O'Connor said Monday that he expects to release results from three or four City Council races and possibly one Park Board district on Wednesday.

However, results from the closest council races, in the Fourth and Fifth Wards, won't come until a later batch of counting.

O'Connor said the hand-counting of ballots -- required by Minneapolis' new ranked-choice voting -- has been going relatively quickly. But the verification of results, which requires an exact match of the number of ballots counted for each contest in a precinct, has slowed the process. That step must be completed before the results are fed into computers for a ranking of candidates to determine who has hit the threshold for election on the basis of first-choice votes, and second or third choices if needed.

City election officials released tallies in all of the contests on election night. But those lacked a determination of the threshold needed to declare a winner in each race.

STEVE BRANDT

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