 | - Matt Sepic | MPR News
Nov. 3, 2020
Voters head to the polls as Election Day finally arrives | |
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Good morning. Today's Election Day.
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.
See how things are going at the polls today and follow along with live coverage until the last vote is counted (it could be days or weeks).Inform our reporting if you see or experience something wrong at a polling location.
The weather will be nice for voting. Sunny skies throughout the state, with temperatures ranging from mid-50s to lower 60s in northern Minnesota, and from mid-60s to mid-70s in the southern part of the state. The Twin Cities may expect highs in the upper 60s. Check out Updraft for more weather coverage.
How does MPR News determine who wins an election? We rely on the Associated Press to count and call races. Here's how they do it.
Officials in Minnesota and across the country are preparing for threats against the integrity of Tuesday’s election, ranging from the spread of false information to voter intimidation. In an election that’s already complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic and a contentious presidential race, state officials are expressing confidence that the state’s election system is up to the task.
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.
Minnesota is no stranger to having its elections spill into the courts. It had back-to-back statewide recounts, including a 2008 Senate race that took until the summer of 2009 to resolve.
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.
As COVID-19 spreads rampantly across Minnesota, health officials are warning the state could end up as bad as Wisconsin unless more Minnesotans start taking more personal responsibility.
Minnesota’s seeing its own problems multiplying amid record outbreaks among its neighbors to the east and west. An explosion of cases that turned October into one of Minnesota’s worst months in the pandemic is spilling over into November.
The state is currently seeing cases expand rapidly in every region of the state, every age bracket and every racial or ethnic group. That’s different from earlier in the pandemic when outbreaks were concentrated in particular areas or demographics. “Minnesota is in a bad spot … and it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” Kris Ehresmann, the state’s infectious disease director, told reporters Monday as she implored Minnesotans to wear masks in public gathering spaces, socially distance and take other measures to stem the spread.
Health investigators, she added, are increasingly seeing people with COVID-19 reluctant to provide details that would help trace the disease’s path. “This just accelerates the spread that were seeing even more.”
Here are Minnesota’s current COVID-19 statistics:- 2,484 deaths (9 new)
- 153,620 positive cases (2,954 new), 132,125 off isolation
- 2,905,229 tests, 1,892,223 people tested (about 34 percent of the population)
- 10.1 percent seven-day positive test rate (officials find 5 percent concerning)
~ Matt Mikus, MPR News ( @mikusmatt)
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