911,000 Absentee Ballots In Minnesota Returned, Accepted, Shattering Previous Record

From the Minnesota Reformer:

By Ricardo Lopez

October 16, 2020

Minnesota voters, long known for their fidelity to the ballot box, are going for extra credit in 2020.

The pandemic drove a record number of Minnesotans to request absentee ballots: As of Friday, nearly 1.7 million ballots were requested.

Of those, 911,385 ballots have already been returned and accepted, according to new figures reported by the Minnesota Secretary of State’s office.

“Wow!” read a tweet from Steve Simon, the state’s top elections official.

Simon said by this point in 2016, about 366,000 people had voted by mail.

In 2016, the estimated number of eligible voters was 3,972,330, meaning nearly one in four Minnesota voters have likely already voted this year.

The election is less than three weeks away, and will prove consequential. All 201 legislative seats are up for grabs, and President Donald Trump continues heavily campaigning in the state that he narrowly lost in 2016.

The Minnesota Reformer is an independent, nonprofit news organization dedicated to keeping Minnesotans informed and unearthing stories other outlets can’t or won’t tell..