For many Minnesota voters, their Election Day has already come and gone — more than 1.7 million have already cast their ballots, according to Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon.
Polls in Minnesota open at 7 a.m. until 8 p.m. You can still vote if you are in line by 8 p.m. Minnesota also has same day voter registration. Follow our coverage here.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday that they’d be sending federal election monitors to 44 jurisdictions around the country, including the city of Minneapolis. The agency said in a statement that the effort was to preserve the rights of all voters.
But late Monday morning, Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said he wasn’t notified about the U.S. Department of Justice’s plans. Simon said that state law would prohibit law enforcement agents, including the monitors, from entering a polling place unless they’re invited by local authorities.
“Absent any independent federal authority that I’m not yet aware of, I don’t understand how federal observers from the Department of Justice will be afforded automatic access to polling places in Minneapolis or anywhere else,” Simon said.
Already, a federal court has ordered Minnesota’s election managers to set aside ballots that arrive in the days after the election despite a seven-day delivery grace period that was promised for months.
Those ballots will be counted but be segregated in case votes have to be removed from tallies later, said DFL Secretary of State Steve Simon, noting that the count will lay bare whose votes the campaigns are seeking to subtract.
In general, Simon expects the level of litigation to be dictated by the closeness of the outcomes.
“If the margin in Minnesota is wide, there will be less likelihood of litigation. If the margin of Minnesota is slim, there will be more likelihood of litigation.”
Both Republicans and Democrats have been enlisting lawyers just in case.
