MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. (AP) — The Minnesota Supreme Court has ordered election officials in the state’s most populous county to return to a slate submitted by the state Republican Party and elect new members to a board that validates absentee ballots.

In an order handed down Tuesday night, the court said officials in Hennepin County, home to Minneapolis and many of its suburbs, had a duty to appoint election judges from outside the party list before allowing cities to elect among themselves and exhaust the number of people available. The court gave the county until Friday to comply.

Until now, the county’s absentee voting board had been filled by four Democrats and one Republican.

minnesota started early in-person voting and absentee voting on September 20. Tuesday’s Supreme Court order, signed by Chief Justice Natalie Hudson, did not invalidate any of the more than 263,000 absentee ballots the county has already received. The current review board has accepted more than 209,000 of those ballots.

The Minnesota Republican Party and an allied group, the Minnesota Voters Alliance, asked the court intervene after determining that no one on the GOP list of more than 1,500 volunteers had been appointed to the Hennepin County absentee voting board. The volunteers came from counties across the state and their names were submitted to the Secretary of State’s Office earlier this year. The Minnesota Democratic Party submitted its own slate to the office, and election judges are supposed to be selected from both parties’ slates.

The absentee voting board is made up of five election judges and several deputy county auditors. Hennepin County officials said in a court filing that 40 of the county’s 45 cities appoint their own election judges and have their own absentee voting boards.

County officials said localities exhausted the list of available election judges before Hennepin County could fill its own absentee voting board. The county had more than 6,000 election judge positions to fill. They said they used authority they believed they had under state law to appoint board members who were not on the list submitted to the Secretary of State’s Office.

Secretary of State Steve Simon argued in a court filing that the county had complied with state law, but the Supreme Court disagreed. He said the county should start with names submitted by political parties to fill election board seats, although his order did not specifically say how many Republicans or Democrats should be named.

According to the county’s filing, the absentee voting board processes and counts all absentee ballots sent through the U.S. mail, by in-person absentee voting at the county courthouse in Minneapolis, or sent to one of communities that lack their own board.

State Republican Party Chairman David Hann called Tuesday’s court decision “a huge victory for election integrity in Minnesota” and said all counties should be informed.

“The Court’s order made clear that there is no ambiguity in the law: Hennepin County cannot bypass the Party’s slate of election judges,” Hann said in a statement.

Hennepin County Auditor Daniel Rogan said in a statement that the county would email people on the list Thursday to recruit election judges for the absentee voting board. He said the Supreme Court’s ruling was made on limited grounds and noted that the court recognized that the board was operating with sufficient partisan balance as required by state law.

The Secretary of State’s Office said in a statement that the ruling “provided clarity on a technical and previously ambiguous statute” and will not delay ongoing absentee ballot verification processes.

Hann and other Republicans said at a news conference earlier this month that they were not aware of any other counties that had not followed the proper process for filling absentee voting boards, but they did not rule out the possibility of problems in others. places. They said they started by looking at Hennepin County because of its size.

Hennepin County election officials had already come under fire after a private courier vehicle collecting absentee ballots from several communities was left unattended with its trunk open in front of Edina City Hall for several minutes earlier this month. The county said security video showed that no one tampered with the sealed ballot boxes inside, that all ballots had been counted and that no new ballots had been introduced.

The courier company fired the driver.

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