A few updates from SD Canvassing Group:
The South Dakota Canvassing Group team and volunteers staffed the elections all over the state, but especially in Minnehaha and Lincoln Counties. They were poll workers, poll watchers, delivered supplies, staffed the election seasonal help, helped develop and mark ballots for sufficient test decks, and will work the post-election audit. Our team is everywhere. You all were amazing. Yes the reporting was slow in Minnehaha County and the trolls are hounding Leah, like usual, but we can tell you the elections have never been run as well as they are under the leadership of Leah Anderson and Mike Mathis. We just got home after working 33+ hours straight. We will rest up and put out information after we are able to process everything that just happened. For now, it’s a great day to be an American, and an even better day to be a South Dakotan!!
In response the the below Dakota Scout article: “HMMMMM – an IT issue preventing the upload of election results. You know – to the Microsoft cloud based Total Vote system that crashed on Friday. But yeah, you keep blaming Leah. Everyone in a position of authority as a lesser magistrate needs to take the security issues we’ve presented for the last three years seriously or you can expect delayed reporting, anomalous data, corrupted voter rolls, statewide crashes, and “glitches” as the norm.”
https://www.thedakotascout.com/p/ballots-counted-but-it-issue-delays
Ballots counted, but IT issue delays reporting Minnehaha County results
State’s largest county again lags rest of South Dakota in reporting election outcomes
Minnehaha County finished counting ballots at about 1 p.m. Wednesday, but an IT delay in uploading the files continued to delay results in several key legislative races.
“We’ve been done for a while,” Minnehaha County Auditor Leah Anderson told The Dakota Scout. “We’re just waiting for it too upload.”
Anderson was getting ready for another long night of preparing the results for Friday’s special Minnehaha County Commission meeting, which is scheduled to canvass the results of the election.
The delay in reporting election results continued a trend for the state’s largest county, which has had a long reputation for its delays in counting and reporting ballots. Anderson said the process is made more complicated by the number of absentee ballots her office receives, including those from overseas.
Those overseas ballots are mailed to the office on standard sized office letter paper and then must be reproduced on the longer form ballot. Absentee ballots must be processed before they can be tallied, Anderson said.
The process requires staff to record the name of each voter on a pollbook the same way a poll worker would if an in-person voter came in on Election Day. Although she could have started counting absentee ballots on Tuesday morning, they had to undergo processing first.
“If you’ve got 2,000 ballots in a precinct, you need to write down 2,000 names,” she said.
Going forward, if she had to recommend changes to state law, she would recommend that the 45-day in-person early voting window be shortened. She said her staff had to work late nights each of those nights. And she would also end early voting on the Friday before the election, not the Monday before in order to give staff a night of rest before the election.
“There are a lot of people who want to throw complaints, but until you come and see the process and how hard they worked, they wouldn’t make those complaints,” Anderson said. “My staff and I worked very hard.”
