The Minnesota GOP scores a challenging victory that will review absentee ballots in Hennepin County

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) – The Minnesota Supreme Court has ordered election officials in the state’s most populous county to go back to a list submitted by the state Republican Party and elect new members to a board that validates absentee ballots.

In a ruling issued late Tuesday, the court said officials in Hennepin County — home to Minneapolis and many of its suburbs — had a duty to appoint election judges from the party’s list before letting cities choose from it and exhausting the pool of available people. The court gave the county until Friday to comply.

Until now, the county’s absentee ballot had been filled by four Democrats and one Republican.

Minnesota began personal early voting and absentee voting on September 20. Tuesday’s Supreme Court order, signed by Chief Justice Natalie Hudson, did not invalidate any of the more than 263,000 absentee ballots the county already received. More than 209,000 of these ballots have been accepted by the current audit committee.

The Republican Party of Minnesota and an allied group, the Minnesota Voters Alliance, requested the court to intervene after determining that no one on the Republican Party’s list of more than 1,500 volunteers had been designated for Hennepin County’s absentee ballot. The volunteers were drawn from counties across the country and their names were submitted to the minister’s office earlier this year. The Minnesota Democratic Party submitted its own slate to the office, and election judges are supposed to be drawn from both parties’ slates.

The absentee voting board consists of five election judges and several county auditors. Hennepin County officials said in a lawsuit that 40 of the 45 cities throughout the county appoint their own election judges and have their own absentee ballots.

County officials said the precincts exhausted the list of available election judges before Hennepin County could fill out its own absentee ballot. The county had over 6,000 election judge positions to fill. They said they used the authority they believed they had under state law to name board members who were not on the list submitted to the secretary of state’s office.

Secretary of State Steve Simon argued in a lawsuit that the county had complied with state law, but the Supreme Court disagreed. It said the county must start with names submitted by the political parties to fill spots on the ballot, though its order did not specifically say how many Republicans or how many Democrats to appoint.

According to county filings, the absentee ballot process processes and counts all absentee ballots submitted via the U.S. mail, via in-person absentee voting at the county courthouse in Minneapolis, or submitted to one of the communities that lack their own board.

State GOP Chairman David Hann called Tuesday’s court ruling “a huge victory for election integrity in Minnesota” and said all counties should take note.

“The court’s ruling made clear that there is no ambiguity in the law — Hennepin County cannot bypass the party’s slate of election judges,” Hann said in a statement.

Hennepin County Auditor Daniel Rogan said in a statement that the county would send emails to people on the list Thursday to recruit election judges for the absentee ballot. He said the Supreme Court ruling was made on a narrow basis, pointing out that the court recognized that the board was operating with sufficient party balance as required by state law.

The secretary of state’s office said in a statement that the ruling “clarified a technical and previously ambiguous statue” and will not delay ongoing absentee ballot verification processes.

Hann and other Republicans said at a news conference earlier this month that they knew of no other counties that had failed to follow the proper process for filling out absentee ballots, but they did not rule out the possibility of problems elsewhere. They said they started by looking at Hennepin County because of its size.

Hennepin County election officials had already been criticized after a private courier truck picking up absentee ballots from several communities was left unattended with its trunk open outside Edina City Hall for several minutes earlier this month. The county said security video showed no one tampered with the sealed ballots inside, that all the ballots had been accounted for and that no new ballots had been slipped in.

The courier company fired the driver.