Minnesota State Wire

The State Finance and Policy and Elections Committee acknowledged a “brief failure” and “lapse of judgment” by Secretary of State Steve Simon in wake of recent technical difficulties with his office’s online poll finder.

According to a news release issued by Senate Republicans, some voters were being redirected to private, partisan, progressive webpages for polling information on primary election day, due to heavy site traffic.

“Our policy in the event of technical issues is that voters are redirected to find their information via the designated backup, Google’s nonpartisan Voting Information Project,” Simon said in a statement following the mix up. “In an urgent attempt to restore service, a staff person diverged from our emergency plan and, in a serious lapse of judgment, linked to a partisan website that contained polling place information. The moment this error was discovered, we corrected the link. The link in question was active for approximately 17 minutes.”

Additionally, he said that the service to the online poll finder is now restored and running smoothly. He assured voters that there is no evidence that the voting systems were hacked or interfered with and that his office is working toward a more dependable, user-friendly experience.

Reports have noted that the Secretary of State received a $905,000 operating increase to fund the office last year and that the precinct poll finder has previously worked under a greater traffic volume in both 2016 and 2018 despite traffic allegedly being the reason for last week’s failure.

“We need to hold him accountable, certainly, but not to the point where we don’t accept that it was a mistake and that as soon as it was acknowledged, it was corrected,” said Sen. Ann Rest.

Many state officials are miffed by the mix up and Senate Republicans have vowed that they will continue seeking answers to what went wrong in effort to hold Simon, a member of the Democratic Farmer Labor Party, and his office accountable.