MINNEAPOLIS — Minnesota Republican Party Chairwoman Jennifer Carnahan said without facts or evidence that "extreme data abnormalities" might have influenced the state's Nov. 3 elections, and that the party officials uncovered issues "that from a statistical variance standpoint, do not make sense."
The results of the vote are set to be certified by the state canvassing board on Tuesday. Carnahan's claims came as the Trump campaign continues its effort to overturn Biden's win before the results are finalized next month.
Risikat Adesaogun, spokeswoman for the Minnesota secretary of state's office, said Friday that it was "hard to respond to allegations that are so vague and unformed."
"The bottom line is you can't just throw out conjecture and guesswork without real evidence," Adesaogun said. "The place to raise issue with elections administration is through the court system, not social media."
Republican Party leaders in Minnesota are sowing doubt over the outcome of the 2020 election as part of a coordinated effort amid a frantic final push by President Donald Trump and his allies to nullify its outcome through specious court cases in battleground states.
In a separate Facebook post, Carnahan said she has been in touch with an attorney for Trump's campaign before releasing its statement late Thursday.
On Thursday, Trump personal attorney Rudy Giuliani made a series of unsubstantiated allegations of "centralized" fraud during a news conference. Trump has also reportedly pressed officials in Michigan to rescind certification of results in Wayne County, which includes the heavily Democratic city of Detroit.
While Democrat Joe Biden defeated Trump by more than 200,000 votes in Minnesota, Republicans prevailed in key down-ballot races, flipping a Western Minnesota congressional seat that had long been held by the DFL and retaining a narrow majority in the state Senate. Two freshman GOP congressmen, including Carnahan's husband, Jim Hagedorn, also won re-election.
Secretary of State Steve Simon has hailed the election as an administrative success devoid of fraud or security lapses. A record 3.2 million Minnesotans voted in this month's general election and at a turnout rate not seen since 1960. A historic number of absentee ballots — 1.8 million — were cast amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Meanwhile, State Sen. Mary Kiffmeyer, a Big Lake Republican who leads the Senate's committee on government and elections, earlier this week asked Simon for a report the "conduct of Minnesota's 2020 primary and general elections," citing "anecdotal reports of irregular election activities, questions on software, equipment malfunctions and other concerns" this year.
Kiffmeyer's letter, dated Wednesday, set a Dec. 5 deadline for Simon to respond for requests for information on voting software and tabulation, a consent decree in state court that extended the counting deadline for absentee mail ballots, and the use of federal CARES Act money. Kiffmeyer said the historic uptick in mail ballots in response to COVID-19 has led to "serious concern over the accuracy and compliance of software used to count and capture votes in the state." She also criticized Simon's agreement in response to a lawsuit in state court to extend by one week the deadline for accepting absentee ballots.
A central theme of Republicans' arguments in Minnesota appears to be this: Trump narrowly lost the state in 2016 without a coordinated group of activists and supporters in Minnesota. So why did he lose by nearly 7 points in 2020 after deploying scores of operatives and investing millions of dollars here?
"Of course it's circumstantial and obviously you would need hard evidence to open up an avenue to the judicial branch but the data is odd," said Jason Lewis, a Republican who failed to unseat U.S. Sen. Tina Smith this election. "I don't think there any question about that."
A lack of statewide electoral success is far from an anomaly in recent Minnesota elections. Starting with the 2006 election, Democrats have won 26 statewide contests, to one for Republicans.
Lewis suggested that state lawmakers should step in to award presidential electors because Simon's consent decree "with like-minded liberal groups" have "circumvented their power to award electors."
Raleigh Hannah Levine, a Mitchell Hamline law professor and election law scholar, said it was not uncommon to have large swings in vote margins from one presidential election to the next, "especially in a very contentious election with such high turnout."
"There has never been anything that would hold up as evidence in any court of law that would suggest that a large swing in vote margin is evidence of voter fraud," she said.
Levine called a strategy whereby state legislatures substitute their own slate of presidential electors as a "serious threat to our democratic process" and an example of the "losing party trying to subvert the democratic process by substituting its preferred candidate for the one lawfully elected by the voters."
"I hope that there is still enough integrity among the various state legislatures involved that they would recognize how incredibly damaging such a move would be," Levine said. "And I wish that voters understood how smooth and fraud-free and largely error-free this election was and were not persuaded by unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud that anybody stole the election from anybody else."
Carnahan is comparing only votes for Democrats in certain counties in 2012, 2016 and 2020, omitting turnout data from 2018 when Democrats also swept statewide races on the midterm ballot. Her analysis does not account for overall turnout shifts or whether similar patterns emerged in other parts of the state.
Wright County Election Administrator Corissa Aronson said she was unaware of Carnahan's concerns and had not received any other "writing or e-mail or phone call about irregularities" with the local results. The only issue local officials detected, she said, was a temporary vendor glitch that uploaded two precincts' results to the online system twice. That mistake was caught and fixed during a manual proofing process.
Aronson said the overall turnout increase overall was on par with what she expected based on previous presidential elections, but she added that the county did see a big spike in voter registration.
A Star Tribune analysis of Minnesota election data since 2000, for both presidential and gubernatorial elections, found nothing irregular about this year's voting trends. Suburban voting trends in the Twin Cities metro area mirrored national trends across American suburbs that favored Biden this year and congressional Democrats in the 2018 midterm. Anoka County's roughly 7-point move toward Democrats this year as compared to 2016 mirrors a similar jump from 2014 to 2018 in the gubernatorial race. Wright County, which Trump handily carried both this year and in 2016, still saw Democrats do about 4 points better than the prior presidential election, just as they improved their margins in 2018.
Carnahan has previously publicly accepted Biden's decisive win in Minnesota. But in a private Zoom conference call reported on earlier this month by the Minnesota Reformer, a nonprofit news site, Carnahan told GOP activists that she would help amplify unproven claims of ballot fraud made by Trump and other party leaders.
On Friday, Minnesota DFL Party Chairman Ken Martin described Carnahan's statement as evidence that the state GOP party "has gone all in on Donald Trump's efforts to subvert a free and fair American election based on no evidence whatsoever."
"When election results we do not like become election results we do not accept, American democracy will cease to function," Martin said. "Minnesotans of all political affiliations must repudiate this attack on democracy if we are to remain a country with the incredible freedom to elect our own leaders."
