Quotes from Election Officials in Minnesota

My son Maxim, who is working right now at Fox News, interviewed several people today about the vote counting typos in Minnesota. As I noted in my piece, these stories might be right, but it still doesn't explain why these problems are occurring for just this one race. Still, they might be correct and I thought that it was important that I pass these points on to my readers.

Paul Tynjola, St. Louis County Auditor

Added 100 votes for Franken and 100 votes for Obama.

Tynjola said that he thought county workers had simply made two typos when the precinct phoned the numbers in. "I guess you could mistake a 5 for a 4," he said, adding that the workers were probably tired.

He said that the thought the error had been made by a county worker and not at the precinct level, because the total number of votes cast in the race had been entered correctly from the beginning.

"There are no suspicions on our part that there were any shenanigans here," he said. "Correcting these errors is part of a normal process that we go through every election cycle… it's unfortunate [that] it's the one race everyone's watching where this happened."

Tynjola said he understood the scrutiny on the vote changes, however.

"If I were a candidate in this race, I'd want to know what was going on with this."

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Cathy J. Clemmer, Pine County Auditor

Added 100 votes for Franken.

Clemmer said that the 100 votes added for Franken were the result of correcting a data entry error by a county elections worker (29 was entered instead of 129.) She said that the precinct always had the right total, but the county had entered it incorrectly.

"I don't know if you've ever worked on a keyboard at 2 in the morning," Clemmer said. "Anything can happen."

The error was detected in a canvassing of precinct vote counts to make sure they matched up with county totals. Clemmer added that today the county had just finished checking results in the rest of the state, and had found no errors.

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Rachel Smith, Anoka County Election Manager

Subtracted 90 votes from Franken and 124 for Coleman. Made similar changes in all other races.

"The precinct officials ran the absentee ballots through the machine twice," Smith explained. "We found out Wednesday and immediately worked to correct it – the updated results were reported Thursday."

Smith explained how the incident had happened. When election workers feed ballots into the optical scan machine for counting, she said, they are supposed to insert a card into the machine when feeding regular ballots and a different card when feeding absentee ballots. That way the machine keeps a tally of how many absentee and regular ballots were cast. Smith said that, unfortunately, precinct officials forgot to put the absentee card in when feeding those ballots. That caused the machine to report that no absentee ballots had been cast, and so the precinct workers assumed they had not been counted and feed them in again.

"They had been working hard helping voters all day," Smith explained. "I think they just got flustered."