Even though Oregon is "mail in", one can still deliver the ballot to a designated drop-off by 8:00pm of election day.

If a voter uses the mail, it had to be mailed by Friday, but many Oregonians, especially in urban areas, still wait 'til the last minute, then drop off their ballot. All those ballots have to be opened and verified before they're put into the computer.

In small population rural areas things go quickly. Urban areas, not so much.

But at least there are no lines...

Hee hee!

But it's fun, cause so it's so easy. lol

Yes. its great news.

You are correct, Minnesota does not have any provisional ballots. Anyone not correctly registered can, with ID or a Voucher, register at the polls on election day.

There are also no outstanding absentee ballots. Absentee ballots are accepted up till election day, sorted by precinct, and delivered to the precinct to be counted with the on site ballots.

This Year Minnesota allowed for those resident outside the US to vote electronically using either E-Mail or Fax. This applied to both military and civilian Minnesotans outside the US. They were able to register, request ballots by E-Mail, and then either download them, print them out, and fax them back -- or vote on line, with the ballots printed out at the Sec. of State's office and delivered to the voter's precinct.

Minnesota's Recount Process is all in state law, not in administrative law by the Secretary of State. It is highly specific, most of it over the years has been tested in court (we have lots of recounts of local elections), and until the process is complete, there is little involvement of the courts. For this, we can thank the recount of a Governor's race in 1962-63 between Anderson and Rolvaag, that lasted till the middle of March, that eventually involved every court you ever heard of, and was eventually resolved by a state-wide recount. The upshot of this was a determination by the Legislature to write an exceptionally clear recount law. That was done in the mid-60's. Then we reformed the rest of our election process in the mid to late 80's, which among other things gave us one balloting system state wide -- and while doing that they also updated the recount laws.

What's missing in the linked description, is the role of the county and state canvas boards. Any question as to voter intent on a ballot is first reviewed by the county canvas board, can be appealed to the state canvas board, and only then on to the State Supreme Court, with is the final appeal.

I suspect most of the re-count will be by hand count, and there are 2.9 million ballots. It will not begin till at least the middle of Nov., as the State Canvas Board will not meet till the end of next week, and only that board can mandate the full recount based on the very narrow margin. The preliminary and unofficial numbers can change this week -- before the county canvas boards meet, because they will be discovering minor math errors, transposed figures and the like in the first preliminary count. Today it went from a 480 margin this morning to a 430 margin late afternoon -- such small shifts are expected at this point. Whether it is likely to change the winner -- don't know. I do know that Hennepin County (Minneapolis) has had the lowest error rate in the entire US for a large Board of Elections for about 10 years running.

The one place one might find uncounted votes will be marks the machine read did not pick up -- perhaps people who used light pencil instead of the provided dark pens, small check marks outside the oval, things like that. If intent of voter is clear, they will be counted. We'll see. I went over my black marks in the oval twice just to make sure they were deeply blackened.

Anyhow, I don't think we will provide Florida style strum und drang.