Minnesota senator accidentally votes for elections bill

ST. PAUL — In what could have been initially viewed as an act of bipartisanship in Minnesota's Senate, a Republican legislator voted for a DFL-backed elections bill last week. However, it turns out that the vote was accidental.

The bill, SF 4729/HF 4772, if passed in its current state, would enact the Minnesota Voting Rights Act, ease voter restrictions for students and people without housing and make changes to campaign finance laws.

Republicans widely condemned the bill as partisan, saying it takes local control away from voters and fails to address their concerns about election integrity.

“Democrat, single-party control has violated Minnesota’s historical tradition of bipartisan election law changes,” Sen. Mark Koran, R–North Branch, said in a statement shortly after the bill passed in the Senate.

So, it may have been surprising to see one Republican, Rochester Sen. Carla Nelson, vote in favor of the bill after heated debate on the Senate floor.

The vote, however, was cast in error because Nelson says she had lost track of where the floor was on the debate while she was multitasking. She apologized for the oversight.

"I am extremely concerned this legislation contains difficult burdens for our local communities and fails to increase transparency and integrity in our elections, and I will be voting against it when it returns to the Senate floor," she wrote in a statement to Forum News Service.

It is unclear how often legislators in Minnesota cast votes by mistake. The New York Times reported that members of Congress mistakenly voted the wrong way 112 times between 2011 and 2014.

The voting rights bill was passed by both the Senate and House of Representatives this month and has been referred to a conference committee where legislators will work on reconciling differences between the Senate and House bills.

Nelson's error echoes the 2022 legalization of small amounts of THC in edibles. Several Republicans said they were unaware of what the bill actually did.

Sen. Jim Abeler, R-Anoka, told the Star Tribune he thought the law would regulate certain THC products, not legalize edibles that contained THC. Sen. Jeremy Miller, R-Winona, the then-Senate Majority Leader, declined to comment at the time if he knew it would legalize THC edibles.