Early voting is popular this year in Becker County - Detroit Lakes Tribune | News, weather, sports from Detroit Lakes, Minnesota

DETROIT LAKES — With less than a week to go until Election Day, the security situation looks good, with no apparent threats in Minnesota, Becker County Sheriff Todd Glander said in a recent interview.

Election Day will be business as usual for local law enforcement. “My staff will patrol that night as usual. If there’s an issue, my staff will respond,” Glander said. “Like every election, we hope everything is peaceful.” If there are problems with threats or incidents, law enforcement will investigate fully, he added.

“Traditionally, since I’ve been sheriff, elections have been mostly peaceful and we hope it stays that way,” Glander said. Voting is a right that citizens have, and law enforcement is there to make sure nothing interferes with that right, he added.

The sheriff’s office also takes care to follow state statute 204C.06, which regulates peace officers during elections. The law specifies that “except when summoned by an election judge to restore the peace or when voting or registering to vote, no peace officer shall enter or remain in a polling place or stand within 50 feet of the entrance of a polling place.” Glander said he recently sent out a message to deputies and dispatchers reminding them about the law.

Sheriff’s officers will work with city police officers to ensure a peaceful election, and law enforcement will respond quickly if there’s any trouble, Glander said. “Our officers will get involved as needed,” he added.

Early voting has been steady at the Becker County Auditor-Treasurer’s Office. “The line was going down the stairs on Friday,” Becker County Auditor-Treasurer Mary Hendrickson said on Monday. There were no long lines on Monday, but there was a fairly steady flow of people coming into the courthouse to put their vote in the bank. The courthouse offers direct balloting, which is essentially the same as voting on Election Day – you circle the ovals on the paper ballot and feed it into the counting machine.

“The nice thing about the direct balloting is people trust it more and it costs us less (than the multiple-envelope absentee ballot system),” Hendrickson said. “There’s no postage, and no envelopes for us to pay for. They come in, fill out their ballot, put it in the machine, and they know it’s counted.”

Hendrickson said her office has brought in extra staff to handle the steady flow of early voters, and said her office has also trained extra election judges.

“It’s good that people are getting involved,” she said. “Presidential elections always have more turnout.”

Early voting has been underway in Minnesota since Sept. 20, and in the first five weeks of voting, local election officials distributed 878,931 absentee and mail ballots in Minnesota, according to the Minnesota Secretary of State’s Office.

In Minnesota, elections are conducted by local election officials at the county, city, and township level. The Office of the Minnesota Secretary of State provides resources, training, and support to these election officials.

Minnesotans can choose to vote in one of three ways:

In-Person on Election Day: Minnesotans can vote in-person at their local polling place on Tuesday, Nov. 5. Find a polling place at mnvotes.gov/pollfinder . All polling places are open until 8 p.m. As long as voters are in line to vote by 8 p.m. they can vote. In Minnesota, people can register to vote on election day .

Minnesota’s paper-ballot system is the gold standard for election security, since the ballots can easily be tracked, recounted and audited, according to Simon.