Ballots counted, but IT issue delays reporting Minnehaha County results

State's largest county again lags rest of South Dakota in reporting election outcomes

A Minnehaha County employee works at uploading election outcome information Wednesday afternoon

Minnehaha County finished counting ballots at about 1 p.m. Wednesday, but an IT delay in uploading the files continued to delay results in several key legislative races.

“We’ve been done for a while,” Minnehaha County Auditor Leah Anderson told The Dakota Scout. “We’re just waiting for it too upload.”

Anderson was getting ready for another long night of preparing the results for Friday’s special Minnehaha County Commission meeting, which is scheduled to canvass the results of the election.

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The delay in reporting election results continued a trend for the state’s largest county, which has had a long reputation for its delays in counting and reporting ballots. Anderson said the process is made more complicated by the number of absentee ballots her office receives, including those from overseas.

Those overseas ballots are mailed to the office on standard sized office letter paper and then must be reproduced on the longer form ballot. Absentee ballots must be processed before they can be tallied, Anderson said.

The process requires staff to record the name of each voter on a pollbook the same way a poll worker would if an in-person voter came in on Election Day. Although she could have started counting absentee ballots on Tuesday morning, they had to undergo processing first.

“If you’ve got 2,000 ballots in a precinct, you need to write down 2,000 names,” she said.

Going forward, if she had to recommend changes to state law, she would recommend that the 45-day in-person early voting window be shortened. She said her staff had to work late nights each of those nights. And she would also end early voting on the Friday before the election, not the Monday before in order to give staff a night of rest before the election.

“There are a lot of people who want to throw complaints, but until you come and see the process and how hard they worked, they wouldn’t make those complaints,” Anderson said. “My staff and I worked very hard.”