Election official: Absentee voting has problems

Minnesota Public Radio's Cathy Wurzer speaks with Ramsey County elections administrator, Joe Mansky, about absentee voting. Minnesota is less than three weeks away from Election Day, but more Minnesotans are choosing to forgo going to their polling place in person and instead are voting absentee.

Secretary of State Mark Ritchie said last week that more than 100,000 Minnesota voters requested absentee ballots. Of those, more than 41,000 have already been returned by voters and accepted.

A study for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that 21 percent of voters requesting absentee ballots in the last presidential election did not have their votes counted. Some voters never received the ballots. Others never returned them and some ballots were rejected by elections officials.

A recent story in the New York Times described the increased use of absentee and other forms of mail-in voting across the country. That story found that not only are these sorts of ballots less likely to be counted, but also seem to be dramatically more susceptible to fraud.