All over but the counting: Minnesota polls close
Updated: 8:04 p.m.
Minnesota voters headed to the polls Tuesday to cast ballots for school boards, city councils and mayoral races around the state.
Polls closed, leaving only the waiting and counting around key issues and races. Those in line at 8 p.m. could still cast a ballot.
In Minneapolis, voters were deciding whether to replace the city's Police Department with a new Department of Public Safety, more than a year after George Floyd's death under the knee of a white police officer launched a movement to defund or abolish police across the country.
Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey is also in a tough fight for a second term, facing a bevy of opponents who have attacked him for his leadership in the wake of Floyd's death. Frey opposed the policing amendment. Two of his leading challengers in the field of 17 candidates, Sheila Nezhad and Kate Knuth, strongly supported the proposal.
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Minneapolis voters are also deciding whether to replace the city's unusual "weak mayor, strong council" system with a more conventional distribution of executive and legislative powers that would give the mayor clearer authority over day-to-day government operations.
While results from the ballot questions were expected Tuesday night, the mayoral race was a question mark because the city uses ranked choice voting. If no candidate reaches 50 percent in the first round of counting, the winner would be determined after a tally Wednesday of second- and potentially third-choice votes.
Across the river in St. Paul, voters are weighing in on the mayoral race, although that hasn’t drawn quite as much attention as in Minneapolis. The City Council is not on the ballot, although there are a number of school board seats up for election.
And like in Minneapolis, a rent control measure is before voters, though St. Paul’s rent stabilization proposal is more specific and would be a first in the nation if passed. A coalition of housing advocacy and neighborhood groups gathered more than 9,000 signatures to put a proposed new ordinance on the ballot that would cap rent increases at 3 percent each year.
Unlike rent policies elsewhere, St. Paul’s cap would apply immediately to new apartment buildings as well as existing units. And, it would stop landlords from dramatically raising rents between tenants.
Meanwhile, there are an unusually high number of school district special elections this year. Nearly 70 school board members have resigned their positions — triple the resignations in a normal year. The vacant seats are, in large part, the result of contentious disagreements over things like masking, COVID-19 policies, and critical race theory, or CRT.
Violent school board meetings and threats toward school board members over these issues have caused dozens of board leaders to quit their positions. And now, Minnesota School Boards Association executive director Kirk Schneidawind said, these issues seem to be at the center of many school board campaigns and platforms.
Public safety in Minneapolis
The future of policing in the city where Floyd's death in May 2020 launched a nationwide reckoning on racial justice overshadowed everything on the municipal ballot. The debate brought national attention to the election, as well as a river of out-of-state money seeking to influence a contest that could shape changes in policing elsewhere, too.
The proposed amendment to the city charter would remove language that mandates that Minneapolis have a police department with a minimum number of officers based on population. It would be replaced by a new Department of Public Safety that would take a "comprehensive public health approach to the delivery of functions" that "could include" police officers "if necessary, to fulfill its responsibilities for public safety."
Supporters of the change argued that a complete overhaul of policing is necessary to stop police violence. They framed it as a chance to reimagine what public safety can be and to devote more funding toward new approaches that don't rely on sending armed officers to deal with people in crisis.
But opponents said the ballot proposal contained no concrete plan for how the new department would operate and expressed fear that it might make communities already affected by gun violence even more vulnerable to rising crime. The details, and who would lead the new agency, would be determined by the mayor and the City Council.
Two nationally prominent progressive Democratic leaders — U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, who represents the Minneapolis area, and state Attorney General Keith Ellison — both supported the policing amendment. But some leading mainstream liberals, including Gov. Tim Walz and U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith, opposed it and feared the backlash could lead to Democratic losses across the country in 2022.
Support didn't cleanly follow racial lines. Opponents included several prominent Black leaders, including some who have been top voices in the police accountability movement.
Minister JaNaé Bates, a spokesperson for the pro-amendment campaign, told reporters Monday that even if the proposal fails, the activists behind it have changed the conversation around public safety.
"No matter what happens, the city of Minneapolis is going to have to move forward and really wrestle with what we cannot unknow: that the Minneapolis Police Department has been able to operate with impunity and has done quite a bit of harm and the city has to take some serious steps to rectify that," Bates said.
Early turnout high in Minneapolis, St. Paul
Early voter turnout more than doubled in Minneapolis this year as compared to the last mayoral election in 2017. And it’s more than six times as many early voters than in 2013. There have already been 30,000 ballots cast in Minneapolis. High turnout is expected Tuesday as well.
“Nationally, if you have an off-year city election like we’re doing this year, you’re lucky to get about a 20 percent turnout,” said Minneapolis City Clerk Casey Carl. “Four years ago, we had 44 percent turnout. I wouldn’t be surprised if we beat that this year — high 40s or maybe even 50 percent turnout of our total registered voter population.”
Ramsey County elections officials say there was unprecedented interest in early and absentee voting, although it isn’t quite as high as Minneapolis.
David Tripplet, the elections manager in Ramsey County, said there have been about 5,900 absentee ballots returned in St. Paul so far, out of about 8,500 returned through the whole county.