Why Minneapolis took longer to count ballots than St. Paul

St. Paul voters knew that state Rep. Kaohly Her was their new mayor around midnight, just hours after the polls closed.

Minneapolis voters had to wait another 12 hours before the city announced Mayor Jacob Frey had won a third term midday Wednesday.

Both cities use ranked-choice voting, which lets voters rank their preferences and — unless one candidate wins a majority of first-choice votes — requires election administrators to reallocate votes from additional rounds.

That happened in both cities this week. So what accounts for the seemingly long wait for results in Minneapolis?

Turns out, even in elections under similar circumstances, there’s more than one way to count the ballots. Minneapolis wrote its ordinance in a way that requires human intervention. Ramsey County, meanwhile, had fast results for St. Paul thanks to technology.

The differences illustrate how the complex, carefully controlled processes elections officials use vary based on which city or county you’re in — even if the result is the same.

“Accuracy is the most important,” said Aaron Grossman, Minneapolis’ election administration manager. “However, we totally understand that members of the public, candidates especially, [and] others are really eager to get the results.”

Plus, the county administers the city’s election, meaning everything’s at their fingertips after data arrives from the precincts.

The county started the electronic tabulation process around 11:30 p.m. on Election Day and posted results to its website at 11:58 p.m., Ramsey County Elections Manager David Triplett said in an email.

Before this election, St. Paul often didn’t know winners until days following the election, Triplett said. Teams of election judges reallocated votes manually in a process that didn’t start until a few days after the election.

The county has said the new process saves money compared to the old system, which cost $30,000 per election. Because the software, RCTab, is open-source, anyone can confirm the result by feeding in the vote cast record.

Things work a bit differently across the river, where Minneapolis administers its own elections with the help of Hennepin County.

Then the city has to follow the order of operations outlined in city ordinance, and that involves humans because the technology available doesn’t align with Minneapolis’ requirements.

The first step? Read through names of all write-in candidates and count votes for any registered write-in candidates, which takes about 45 minutes.

Then, two teams of workers manually reallocate ranked-choice votes using spreadsheets. It’s a cut-and-paste process, where second- and sometimes third-choice votes from candidates with no chance of winning are reallocated.

That was done by about 11 a.m. in the mayor’s race. The two teams check in with each other along the way to make sure they’re getting the same result.

Once the results are validated and looked over, they’re posted to the city’s website.

Even though Minneapolis can’t use the RCTab software as a primary method for ranked-choice tabulation, it does use it to check the manual results, Grossman said. (Anyone in Minneapolis can also check results with something called the “cast vote record,” which is made public after canvassing.)