One in three Olmsted County voters have already cast their ballots
In a recent county board meeting, it was reported that the election office expects about half of Olmsted County’s ballots to be cast prior to Election Day — be it through mail-in voting, drop-off balloting, or in-person absentee voting.
Katie Smith, Olmsted County’s elections director, says her office has received a ballot from roughly one-third of Olmsted County’s registered voters already — that’s over 30,000 ballots already, and she says that number is still going up fast.
“I know we’re seeing anywhere from 300 to 400 people a day in-person, and we’re getting probably at least 200 by drop-box each day,” said Smith.
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Chances are, lots of readers are among that number — but for those of you still waiting on turning in your ballot, here’s some advice from the people in charge.
First, if you’re wanting to avoid possible lines and voting in-person at your polling place, you still have options. The Olmsted county elections office has hosted in-person absentee balloting for weeks, and the drop-off ballot box outside the building will be open through most of Election Day.
If your mail-in ballot is postmarked by Election Day, election officials will be allowed to count them until November 10th - a special extension thanks to the pandemic. However, Mark Krupski, director of Olmsted County’s property records and licensing, told us that Rochester envelopes get postmarked at the mail processing center in St. Paul — so if you wait to the last minute to send in your ballot, that transport time could be the difference between your vote being counted or thrown out.
“If I mail it on the 2nd, hopefully it gets up there and gets the November 3rd postmark,” said Krupski. “I don’t like that chance myself, I wouldn’t do that, and if I mail it on the 3rd, chances are I won’t get that postmark.”
There’s lots of important dates and times to keep in mind. In-person absentee balloting closes at 5 p.m. Monday. “Agent delivery” - where a voter can designate someone to drop off their ballot for them — ends at 2 p.m. Tuesday. All drop-off balloting will be closed an hour later. Polls, of course, close at 8 p.m. Tuesday — and we should have a majority of the local results by that night, or early Wednesday morning.
It’ll be the end of an election cycle so massively different from any one before it — one that Krupski says took a heroic effort from the entire team. Even then, it’s easy to imagine a scenario where none of the changes for this year would have been possible.
“If there’s anything lucky about the pandemic, it came in the winter, when we had time to adjust to that,” said Krupski. “If it had came on in August, it might have been harder, because a lot of laws were changed to accommodate some procedures just for this election.”
