ST. PAUL, Minn. — Early voting for Minnesota’s Super Tuesday primaries begins Friday, and the state’s chief elections official says his office is prepared to meet the challenges of disinformation, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and physical threats and intimidation against poll workers.
“We have a combination of systems that allow almost no other state to guarantee the reliability of our election results,” Secretary of State Steve Simon said at a news conference on Thursday. He listed new election security laws, multiple layers of security for voting from home, public testing of the accuracy of voting machines and a large corps of volunteer election judges from the major parties.
Super Tuesday is March 5, when sixteen states hold presidential primaries. Minnesotans can vote early in person at city and county election offices, or request an absentee ballot to vote from home. Early voters have until Feb. 15 to get their ballot back if they change their mind for any reason, such as if their preferred candidate drops out of the race. Arkansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Virginia and Vermont will also begin Super Tuesday voting in some capacity on Friday or Saturday. Alabama started on January 10.
“There is no doubt that this election year will be one of the most intense in history,” Simon told reporters. “The presidential candidates are likely to stir strong feelings. People will be passionate. And that’s okay. … We just want to make sure it’s channeled in the right direction, in a positive direction, in a non-violent direction.”
Simon, a Democrat, said the “spread of disinformation about our current system” will likely be the biggest 2024 election challenge. While he said debate over how the voting system should work is normal and welcome, the “intentional spread of false information is a danger.” He encouraged voters to seek reliable information from state and local elections offices.
Artificial intelligence is less a threat to election security than a way to “amplify existing threats such as disinformation,” he said. He added that Minnesota is ahead of the curve because lawmakers last year imposed criminal penalties for distributing deepfake images of a person without their consent within 90 days of an election, if done with the intent to influence the election.
Bill Ekblad, the minister’s head of election security, said he and Simon met with 50 election teams from the province last week for a tabletop exercise to help them respond to any security threats. No foreign adversaries are known to have tried to crack Minnesota’s election system in 2020, he said. But in 2016, 21 states were targeted. Ekblad called Russia the country that “rattled the doorknobs” without entering.
Minnesota has seen some cases of intimidation, threats and intimidation against local election administrators, but almost none have targeted the state’s 30,000 volunteer judges, Simon said. He added that a new law strengthens penalties for such acts.
Minnesota’s 16- and 17-year-olds have been able to pre-register to vote since June, so those who have turned 18 since then can vote in the presidential primaries. That includes convicted felons who have completed their prison sentences, under another new law.
This will be Minnesota’s second presidential primary in recent decades. Although Minnesota has no party registration, voters will have to decide whether to vote in the Republican, Democratic or Legal Marijuana Now primaries. While their names will still be reported to the party they choose, Simon says it will be more private than in 2020, when all parties could see who voted for which side. That information remains unavailable to the public.
“I’m cautiously optimistic,” Simon said. “For the most part, our polling places in Minnesota are oases of peace, I think, where people can vote in peace and vote with peace of mind.”