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Someone ‘found’ 32 ballots in the trunk of their car.

I am not kidding. That is what is being reported.

Shades of ballot box 13 in Jim Wells County, Texas in 1948.

So much for Minnesota politics being clean. How do you just find extra ballots in a car? Aren't they supposed to be placed in sealed ballot boxes that have numbered seals that indicate tampering if they are removed?

In the precinct I worked. We had three electronic voting booths and one controller. Each voting booth was delivered to the polling with a numbered wire and platstic seal to insure the device had not been tampered with since being reset at the county courthouse. Two election judges were required to document opening the seals of each machine, record the seal numbers, and sign a report documenting this. After the voting booths were set up two zero reports were run documenting that the number of ballots cast and votes for each candidate were zero before the precinct was opened at 7:00 am. Starting at 9:30 am, every two hours an election judge or clerk publicly posted the total numbers of voters casting ballots at the precinct.

At poll closing time, two more report tapes were printed to show how the precinct voted. Then the color coded quadruplicate lists of voters for the princt were separated to go into separate envelopes one which goes to the Texas Secrtary of State. Also placed in the envelope are a copy of the initial zero report and end of day report along with a signed report by the election judges. The other envelopes go to various destinations; I can't remember them all. Before the report envelopes are sealed, the voting booths are packed up, and a new set of serial numbered security tags are place on each booth, and the judges sign a report stating that the tags have placed on each machine, and this report also goes to the Secretary of State.

The controller machine is packed up and taken by an election judge to the county courthouse where it is plugged into a computer and its data is copied to a server were the data is tabulated along with the early and absentee ballots. The next day county workers pick up the sealed voting machines that still have their removeable memory cards inside. In the case of a recount the voting machines will have their memory cards removed and read.

The system is fast and accurate. I looked at the preliminary results that were printed to a 900+ page PDF for 126 precincts just 4 hours after poll closing time. These machines are so accurate and there are so many checks in the system that in one race for precinct county commissioner, the incumbent who lost declined to ask for a recount after losing by just 172 votes out of 20,286 votes cast.