Polling sites see steady stream of voters

There was a line of people outside Cloquet City Hall at 7 a.m. Tuesday morning, waiting for the polls to open.

"There was a line again at 10 a.m. that kind of surprised us, and now there's another one," said head judge John Cavanaugh at about 4:30 p.m. Tuesday. "We've been busy all day."

By 4:30 p.m. they'd seen 675 voters come through, and Cavanaugh was expecting between 800-850 by the end of the day.

The city hall was also busier than usual with people registering to vote, Cavanaugh said, some of them new voters, along with others who had moved or changed their name. Two volunteers worked to help register new voters, who would eventually take their place in one of the six voting booths lining the wall.

Cloquet's Matt Smith was there with his cousin, who had never voted before. The 30-something man told Matt he thought his vote didn't matter.

"I explained to him that it matters more than he thought because there is so much at stake," Smith said, waiting outside the polling station for his cousin to finish. "I feel like we're at a tipping point and whoever gets in will have a much greater influence than former presidents, especially with the way the campaigns have been,"

At polling places across the county there was a steady stream of voters of all ages, many of them bringing children with them to the polls.

That and seeing the lines at City Hall made Iris Keller happy. The Ward 3 City Councilor was unopposed in her race for reelection, and came in to cast her own ballot, showing off three faded "I voted" stickers stuck on an oversized wallet.

"We had a great turnout overall," said Carlton County auditor/treasurer Kevin DeVriendt, happily, as it was his first time running a presidential election.

Countywide, a total of 20,901 Carlton County residents voted in the 2024 election. Of those, 13,349 in-person ballots cast on election day at the 24 polling locations in the county. A total of 4,779 votes were cast via absentee and mail-in ballots over the 46 days before Election Day, starting on Sept. 20. And, for the first time this year, Carlton County also offered people the option of voting with an absentee or mail ballot at the historic Courthouse via direct balloting - when a voter puts their ballot in a machine at courthouse polling location - starting 18 days before the election. A total of 2,773 people voted via direct ballot this year.

Just under 90 percent of registered voters in Carlton County voted this year. DeVriendt compared that to nearly 71 percent in 2022 and 92 percent in 2020.

"Presidential elections are always high here," he said.

Voters did a lot of picking and choosing on their ballots, not casting a vote in every race. Known as an "undervote," the numbers ranged from 71 undervotes in the presidential race to nearly 7,000 in some of the judges' races, which were all listed on the back side of the ballot.

"What we hear in the office a lot of times is 'I don't know any of these people,'" DeVriendt said. "Some people take a crap shoot, a 50-50 shot and guess, while others say 'I don't dare vote in that race because I might be choosing a bad candidate."

The contested local Sixth District Judicial race between Shawn Reed and Gunnar Johnson had fewer undervotes than most of the other judicial races at 5,074, which was still high.

"I think because there were newspaper stories and Reed is from Esko, that's probably why more people voted in that race," he said.

DeVriendt declared the day a success with only one incident requiring law enforcement - see "Envelope creates stir" on this page - but it was still a long one. He and his staff worked until nearly 2:30 a.m. and came back the next morning to continue the election process, preparing canvassing reports for all the municipalities and the schools, plus handling questions about recounts and more.

"We're all a bit bleary-eyed today," he said.