As Minnesota fights the Trump administration in court, local election officials say mail-in ballots have not been controversial.

Mail-in voting has been a largely drama-free affair in Le Sueur County, where 1 in 5 voters cast mail ballots in the 2024 general election.

“Some [voters] choose to mail their ballot and some choose to drop it off. It has been kind of the same through the years,” Carol Blaschko, the county’s election administrator, told MinnPost.

After a spike in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, voting by mail remains common in many rural Minnesota counties, including hundreds of sparsely populated precincts where communities have opted to forgo in-person voting entirely. In Grant County, centered on the city of Elbow Lake in west-central Minnesota, 76% of 2024 votes were cast by mail. Marshall, Cook and Lake of the Woods counties — all in far northern Minnesota — also saw more than 70% of ballots mailed in.

Access to ballots by mail is under threat, though, as the Trump administration pushes new restrictions that could upend the process millions of Americans rely on to cast their votes.

Minnesota officials are defending the state’s mail-in voting system in court and don’t expect the proposed restrictions to affect Minnesota voters in the November midterm election. As the threat looms for future elections, though, it’s unclear how Trump and Republicans’ proposed restrictions would affect election outcomes.

David Schultz, a professor of political science and legal studies at Hamline University in St. Paul, said “the evidence is mixed” that restricting mail-in voting boosts Republican candidates. In 2020, Trump repeatedly asserted without evidence that expanding mail-in voting would benefit Democrats.

“Although Donald Trump criticized mail voting in 2020, many Republican voters continued to use it. Republican candidates have also continued to win many elections during the period in which mail voting has become widespread,” Schultz said.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison last week joined a lawsuit to stop the United States Postal Service from carrying out President Donald Trump’s March 31 order that it create a national voter list and send mail ballots only to people named on it, among other requirements.

Trump said in the order that “additional measures are necessary” to prevent mail ballot fraud, which experts say is rare. Ellison called that argument a pretext for the White House to assert more control over state election administration and shape the electorate to its liking.

“Trump’s executive order is a blatantly unconstitutional power grab and an attack on our freedom to vote,” Ellison said in a statement.

In the lawsuit, Ellison and the other state officials argued that Trump’s order would impose burdensome new requirements that could disenfranchise eligible voters with less than a month to go before early voting begins.

Secretary of State Steve Simon, Minnesota’s top elections official, said in a separate statement that “while the USPS is a valued partner in providing Minnesotans with the convenience of voting from home,” state and federal law make clear that it is not the arbiter of who gets to vote by mail. He told MinnPost in an interview earlier this summer that Minnesota’s state-run mail voting process has multiple safeguards to prevent fraud and ensure votes are counted accurately.

Who votes by mail in Minnesota today?

About 4 in 10 Minnesotans voted by mail in 2020 at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of those temporary converts went back to voting in person as the pandemic faded from memory. A comparatively modest 13.7% of Minnesotans voted by mail in the 2024 general election.

But that’s still nearly 450,000 people, more than the population of Minneapolis. And for about 150,000 people who live in hundreds of “mail ballot” precincts around Greater Minnesota and the Twin Cities’ exurbs, mail remains the default voting method under a 40-year-old state law allowing townships and small cities to forgo in-person voting.

The number of mail-ballot precincts in Minnesota has more than doubled since 2012, according to the Secretary of State’s office, though the most recent count (1,126 in 2024) is down significantly from the 2020 high of 1,345. Mail balloting has become easier statewide since 2014, when a bipartisan state law allowing “no-excuse” absentee voting took effect.

Simon sponsored that law during his time as a Hopkins-based state representative. He said it was time to do away with the old rule that limited mail balloting to voters who were disabled, out of town or very sick.

“On a broad bipartisan basis, we said, ‘That doesn’t make sense anymore,’” Simon said.

The law has multiple safeguards to ensure only active registered voters vote and that each vote counts only once, such as requiring voters to provide two forms of identification when requesting a ballot, attest under penalty of perjury that they are who they say they are and have another person witness that signed oath.

Those protections are sensible enough to appeal to Republicans, Simon said. He cited a fellow secretary of state of a “different party” — he didn’t say who or where — who “cut, pasted, copied it and passed it in his state.”

Every active registered voter in a mail-ballot precinct receives a mail ballot by default, typically at least four weeks before Election Day. Voters who want to vote by mail in other precincts must first request an absentee ballot from the Secretary of State’s office or join the state’s permanent absentee list. Either way, once the voter has the mail ballot in hand, they fill it out and either mail it back to their local elections office or drop it off in person.

The in-person dropoff deadline is earlier for absentee voters in “regular” precincts, however: 5 p.m. on Election Day versus 8 p.m. in mail-ballot precincts.

Le Sueur County had two precincts opt into mail balloting in 2006. The south-central Minnesota county now has seven mail-ballot precincts. In the 2024 general election, 20.5% of Le Sueur County voters cast mail ballots, according to Secretary of State data.

Mail voting is even more common in rural counties across western and northern Minnesota.

With rare exceptions like Cook County, which includes the Grand Portage Indian Reservation and the artsy North Shore town of Grand Marais, these counties are solidly Republican. Trump won Grant County by 30.5%, Lake of the Woods County by 47.1% and Marshall County by a whopping 51.6%. (He lost Hennepin by 42.4% and Ramsey by 43.1%.)

“Mail balloting is particularly relevant in rural areas where voters may otherwise have a significant distance to travel to a polling location,” said Amanda Kiefer, the auditor/treasurer of Wabasha County in southeastern Minnesota’s bluff country. Wabasha County got its first mail precinct in 2012 and has seven today, she said.

Will mail voting be different this year?

The bipartisan consensus may be fraying as the White House works to influence mail voting.

Ellison said last week that Trump’s proposed law would require state election officials to redesign mail ballot envelopes and get approval to use them from USPS, then “develop new systems to communicate mail-voter lists to USPS to ensure that every eligible voter who is entitled to a mail ballot receives one” — all “within a matter of weeks and without any additional resources,” his office said.

The order would also require states to create and train local election officials on the new mail balloting procedures and educate voters about the changes, representing “enormous administrative and financial burdens” that Ellison’s office said could result in eligible voters not receiving their ballots.

Local elections officials contacted by MinnPost were reluctant to talk about what may or may not happen as — or after — the dispute plays out.

Among those declining to comment on the matter were Goodhue County Finance Director Lucas Dahling, whose department oversees elections in the county. He added, however, that voting has gone smoothly “for quite a while” in the tiny city of Bellechester, Goodhue’s sole mail-ballot precinct.

A spokesperson for Dakota County, which in 2024 had five mail-ballot precincts in its rural southern and eastern stretches, also declined an interview request, citing “pending litigation at the federal level.”

Blaschko said Le Sueur County is watching the litigation, but otherwise has no plans to change how it manages mail balloting unless and until there’s a resolution. The county hasn’t received any guidance yet from the Secretary of State’s office, she added.

As for what the Postal Service may or may not do this fall, Kiefer said rural counties like hers are already up against the clock.

“When election procedures change close to an election, counties need enough time to update instructions and procedures, train staff and election judges, communicate with voters, and make any necessary operational changes,” she said. “At this point, our message to voters is pretty simple: make a voting plan and don’t wait until the last minute.”

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Trump says mail-in ballots boost Democrats, but some of Minnesota’s reddest counties rely most on remote voting