SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (KELO) — It has been a long couple of days for election workers in Minnehaha County.
Some election workers were still counting ballots on Wednesday afternoon.
“Well, I’m frustrated especially for the people who are running for office, people who supported those individuals running for office as well as the voters,” South Dakota state representative Linda Duba said.
“It’s taken a long time because we’ve had a great turnout for this election. We’ve had a lot of ballots to process,” Minnehaha County Auditor Leah Anderson said.
Anderson says it took some time to get through the absentee ballots.
“The reason that it’s taking so long with these is there is a large population of people that don’t live within our area and when they vote, they’re outside of the U.S. When their ballot comes in, it’s on an eight and a half by eleven paper. They mail it in, and we have to recreate all of those ballots and put them on an optical scan ballot. There’s probably over a thousand of those that we have to do, and it takes a long time to get them done,” Anderson said.
“Those can be prepped and ready to go the minute that the polls close so that whole process should be done and ready to go, and those ballots should run through that system very quickly,” Duba said.
At about 2:30 Wednesday afternoon, election workers began tabulating the results on the final machine, which would then get combined with the three other machines and sent to the Secretary of State’s website.
“I know people want results quickly, but unfortunately, we have to do the job that we have to do, and do it right,” Anderson said.
Anderson says there were about 29,000 absentee ballots sent in. She also says that she would like to see the 45-day absentee voting window shortened. The Secretary of State’s office website updated to 100% reported a little after 5 p.m. Wednesday.
