In Crosslake, familiar concerns about election security take root ahead of 2024 election
Last December, a now familiar scene played out at a routine Crosslake City Council meeting.
Resident Sonia Slack stood at the podium to argue her case that the city should play a larger role in elections, which are currently administered by Crow Wing County.
She didn’t accuse county officials of wrongdoing.
“It’s just a fact that our local officials are overseeing less and less of our elections. Counties are being turned into central counting facilities,” she said. “Regarding trust and transparency, voters need and deserve to trust the system.”
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Slack and fellow resident Robin Sylvester made a convincing enough case that council members later voted 4 to 1 to explore doing their own absentee ballot counting. The city has until May to notify the county if they plan to move forward.
Local and national election officials say hypothetical concerns, like those raised by Slack and Sylvester, echo fears playing out across communities in Minnesota and beyond. Those fears, they say, have eroded faith in the election system and have contributed to increasing voter division ahead of the presidential election.
The fears are cultivated by candidates up and down the ballot who refuse to concede elections and make unproven claims that the system is rigged against them, said Tammy Patrick, CEO for programs at the National Association of Election Officials.
“The question remains ‘What will we see in November?’ I think we all need to be prepared, no matter who wins and who loses, there’s going to be questions by those who lost on the legitimacy (of the election). And if there actually is some sort of a problem, then it will be reviewed and prosecuted,” she said.
“However, what we’re seeing now is that it’s all being done in the court of public opinion. And that’s where we start to erode confidence in our system.”
A quest for local control
For decades, Patrick said election officials have observed that voter confidence in the election system is higher when their candidate wins.
But in 2020, rhetoric around the legitimacy of the election results was amplified by former President Donald Trump and his allies, spinning off into organizations that perpetuate false information about election security and that provide citizens with tools to question their local systems.
In 2022, a former Rice County election judge sued an election official to make more election records public. In Olmsted County, two election judges were the subject of a police investigation for their actions during the 2022 primary.
Meanwhile, some municipalities have tried to make their process more transparent in response to concerns. In 2022, Crow Wing County hand-counted ballots from four precincts instead of two as required by the state, and found no issues.
But Patrick says these efforts often don’t assuage concerns.
Election officials across the country, she said, have told her of the frustration of trying to educate people about ballot security only to have those voters respond with, "Well, let’s just set the facts aside. I want to talk about how I feel, what I know in my gut.”
Slack and Sylvester declined to be interviewed by MPR News, but said in a statement that “local responsibility and involvement is our only goal.”
During a recent meeting, Sylvester told city council members that if Crosslake moves to count its own absentee ballots that might spur higher voter turnout in the city "because it’s managed right here at home."
Crosslake Mayor David Nevin said their argument is compelling.
“We’re losing control of everything in this life. I mean, in 10 years it’s going to be just email your vote in,” he said. “So the purpose of it is just to take back a little responsibility, you know, bring it back to the community.”
Nevin said he wants to empower citizens who bring ideas forward. In this case, he doesn’t think the request for more local control implies there’s a problem with ballot security.
“You know, with the media, and all the stuff you see on TV and dumping ballots at two o’clock in the morning,” he said. “But I don’t think there’s a local concern about that at all.”
A slow and costly process
A number of Minnesota cities do administer their own absentee ballots, including several in the Twin Cities metro. They’re often larger than Crosslake, which has about 2,400 residents and a small city staff.
Crosslake City Clerk Char Nelson said she was shocked by the proposal.
“I thought they were crazy,” said Nelson, who has helped run elections for more than two decades. “They didn’t seem to have a really good reason as to why to do it.”
No one has provided evidence of problems with the county’s process, or the electronic machines it uses to tabulate votes, said Nelson.
“I think the supporters of this think that the machines do things that they shouldn’t do, and that the results were rigged during the 2020 election,” she said.
She added taking on the added election responsibilities would strain the already-undersized city staff.
There’s been a push in some communities across the U.S. to forgo electronic vote tabulating machines and return to hand-counting ballots. But there’s a limit to what Crosslake could do. State law says a city that has used electronic vote tabulating machines in past elections can’t revert to hand counting in state and federal elections.
The hand-counting process is considered slow and inaccurate, said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon.
“The tabulating machines pound for pound, year-over-year are more accurate than hand counts,” he said. “People make mistakes, and especially people who are doing a hand count after a very long day of having been election judges from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.”
Crosslake could offer citizens the option of casting absentee ballots at city hall instead of mailing them or dropping them off at the county courthouse as they currently do — but only if certain requirements are met, said Deborah Erickson who oversees elections for Crow Wing County.
"Now if they choose to go that path, that's great. What they have to remember is the costs that go along with that,” she said.
The city would need to buy its own tabulating machines. It would need to provide assistive technology for voters with disabilities, and be open extended hours to accept absentee ballots before Election Day.
City council member Aaron Herzog said those costs — estimated at upwards of $40,000 — weren’t included in the city’s budget.
“We’re a small town. That’s quite a bit of money to all of a sudden come up with,” he said.
Herzog doesn’t see any reason to change the current system.
“If something is broken, absolutely,” he said. “You need to take back control. If it’s not broken, why are you?”