Sherburne County will pay for legislative recount, while state will cover the cost in Scott County contest

ST. CLOUD – Sherburne County officials said Saturday the county will pay for the recount of a close legislative contest, in an effort to quash rumors about how ballots were counted on election night and uploaded to the Minnesota Secretary of State website.

On Thursday, county officials announced updated vote counts that widened the gap between DFL Rep. Dan Wolgamott and Republican challenger Sue Ek, in a race that could have implications for which party controls the House.

Meanwhile, a legislative race in the Shakopee area is headed for an automatic recount following rescanning of ballots Friday night that shows the vote margin between the two contenders within the threshold set by state law for a taxpayer-funded recount.

The outcome for the District 54A seat in Shakopee, along with the results of the St. Cloud District 14B race, will control of the House. If the current leaders in both races prevail — both of them DFLers — the House would be evenly divided with 67 DFLers and 67 Republicans.

The Sherburne County totals were updated after county staffers identified absentee ballots that were counted on election night but weren’t included in the unofficial totals posted to the Secretary of State’s website, due to an “an incomplete transfer of data from [one] scanner to the state election reporting system,” according to Sherburne County Administrator Bruce Messelt.

In a release Saturday, Messelt said: “Contrary to circulating rumors, no votes were ‘lost’ and none were ‘found.’ " He said all ballots cast were properly received, documented and counted, “and chain of custody maintained.”

However, he said, some ballot totals failed to upload to the Secretary of State’s website “due to an improperly cleared or partially damaged memory card that did not fully collect and transmit results from some of the processed mail-in ballots.” The memory card subsequently sent some generic data designed to test the reporting system prior to the election, creating “inflated vote totals that later decreased once the error was discovered.”

On Wednesday morning, the Secretary of State’s Office showed Wolgamott had a 28-vote lead over Ek. Updated results now show a difference of 191 votes, with Wolgamott having 50.36% of the vote and Ek 49.4%.

The change prompted Minnesota Republican Party Chair David Hann to call for the Secretary of State’s Office to investigate the results of the District 14B race and pay for a recount.

In a release Friday, Hann said initial reports on election night had Ek winning by four votes with 100% of the precincts reporting. Shortly after that, results showed her losing by 28 votes.

“We have now learned that additional ballots have been ‘found,’” Hann said. “These discrepancies are not only suspect but need to be investigated and explained to Minnesotans immediately.”

Taxpayer-funded recounts are provided for legislative races when the results are within 0.5 percentage points of the total votes cast. Current results show the District 14B race is outside that margin.

Messelt said Saturday that the Secretary of State’s Office had granted Sherburne County preliminary approval to recount selected races by hand, if requested by a candidate, that no longer fall within the threshold for a mandatory publicly funded recount.

Ek said Saturday her campaign had requested that county officials recount the votes.

“It seems like every day there’s a fluctuation in the number of votes, so the whole thing is strange and I hope we get to the bottom of it,” Ek said. “Almost 10,000 people voted for me, so I want to make sure we respect their vote and we get an accurate count in the end.”

The county’s canvassing board is scheduled to meet Tuesday, and the state canvassing board is slated to meet Nov. 21.

Paul Linnell, acting elections director for the Minnesota Secretary of State’s Office, said vote totals often fluctuate a bit between election night and canvassing, though the discrepancy owing to a faulty memory card in Sherburne County isn’t typical.

“We work to emphasize as much as possible that results are unofficial as reported on election night until they are canvassed by the county canvassing boards and then the state canvassing board,” Linnell said.