Minnesota Secretary of State says ballot errors are ‘rare’ after Faribault County incident

BLUE EARTH, Minn. (KTTC) — A ballot error in Faribault County resulted in a state lawmaker being listed under the wrong party on Friday. Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said these types of misprints are rare.

“I can't remember a single case of a misprint of this kind in the last decade,” he said. “There are occasional misprints, but not of this kind.”

Simon said one of the main tasks at the county level is to audit all local ballots. In Faribault County, incumbent state Rep. Peggy Bennett of Albert Lea was incorrectly listed as a DFL candidate, even though she is a Republican. Simon said the misprint affected 17 people in the county who cast their ballots early.

“The good news is the county did the right thing immediately,” he said. “When something like this happens, which is the rare case that it does, it's a petition process in the Minnesota Supreme Court. So they just sent us their draft. [on Monday]. We've looked at it. We've made some changes and we hope and expect that they'll file it with the Minnesota Supreme Court. [on Tuesday].”

Affected early voters can now re-cast their vote or have their original vote counted. All votes already cast for Bennett will continue to go to her, regardless of the party affiliation stated.

“None of us want there to be an error when our name comes up publicly, whether it's a party affiliation, a misspelling of our name, where we're from, nobody wants that,” Simon said. “But to put it in perspective, we have over 5,000 different combinations or variations of ballots across Minnesota, and each of those ballots has potentially dozens of different choices on it, so this was a rare case.”

Simon said Faribault County handled the issue well and he expects the court to reverse the situation, issue an order, and allow the correct ballots to be reordered. KTTC has reached out to Faribault County for comment on this misprint and has not yet received a response.

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