According to State GOP Chairman Tony Sutton, "something doesn't smell right" about a vote reporting error by a Hennepin County election employee on Tuesday night, the Star Tribune reported.
On Election Night, around 11 p.m., Hennepin County elections manager Rachel Smith got a call from Tony Trimble, a Republican Party lawyer involved in the 2008 U.S. Senate seat recount
In a reportedly cordial discussion, Smith told Trimble what had happened: a staffer had mistakenly clicked "Add" instead of "Replace" when transmitting a large file of returns, thus adding updated returns to those already entered. The error was discovered 45 minutes later, and the results then corrected by the secretary of state.
The next morning Trimble appeared next to Sutton at a news conference declaring, "we are going to be very, very aggressive through this recount process that we anticipate."
According to the party chair, the error resulted in a 60,000 vote swing in the governor's race.
However, according to Smith this was an error in reporting results, not in counting results.
Now that a recount will be underway all of the county's ballots are being guarded 24-7 by a sheriff's deputy, according to MPR.
Unlike the 2008 Senate recount, the 470,000 ballots will be kept in one room until the gubernatorial election is resolved.
Smith said that her office will look into new measures to ensure that something like Tuesday night's mistake never happens again.
