Ramsey County holds public viewing of absentee ballot counting process
Workers at the Ramsey County ballot counting center prepare the absentee ballots for the counting process.
ST. PAUL, Minn. (FOX 9) - With more than 1.5 million ballots already cast in Minnesota, there's a huge effort statewide to get them counted as they come in.
In Ramsey County, there's an equally big effort to be as transparent as possible about how that counting works. At the ballot counting center, there’s a public viewing area for up to ten people socially distanced. Betty Dawson has had the space to herself.
“I’ve not encountered any other observers, I’ve been here this past Monday, today, and I’ll be here next Monday,” said Dawson.
She was asked by the Republican Party to watch.
“I have not seen anything that looks suspicious to me at all,” she said.
All ballots at the center have already been through the accepting and rejecting process. At the center, they are audited again for accuracy, then run through ballot counters - souped-up versions of the machines you put ballots into on Election Day.
“So our scanners here are very similar, but they have a much higher capacity, they can count maybe 1,000 ballots in 15 minutes as opposed to a polling place scanner that counts about one ballot every 7 or 8 seconds,” said David Triplett, the Ramsey County elections manager.
The data will be stored securely until the polls close Tuesday.
“Then on election night when we take our memory devices and put those into our non-network servers,” said Triplett. “At 8 p.m., we hit the button and then it will start accumulating all these absentee totals.”
All Ramsey County early votes that have been received have been counted. Friday, they processed 14,000 ballots and wrapped up before lunch.
With transparency in mind in a politically-charged, pandemic-minded process, the vote center is on a livestream during the counts, the ballot statistics are posted on a map sorted by precinct and there’s the public viewing, which for the most part has been only Betty.
“Like I say, I’ve not observed anything that seems to be out of order,” said Dawson.