WINONA, Minn. – Winona County voters continued their historically impressive civic tradition in the 2024 presidential election. Chelsi Wilbright, who runs elections. said the county’s turnout was 93% of registered voters. The breakdown:
> 2024: 27,971 of 30,057 (93.0%), including 7,211 absentee and early voters.
> 2020: 27,312 of 29,591 (92.3), including 11,584 absentee and early voters.
> 2016: 26,309 of 28,813 (91.3%), including 2,742 absentee and early voters.
For the White House, Winona County broke 51.4% for Donald Trump and JR Vance. Statewide it was 50.9% for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
Notable precincts
Precinct 1 in Winona’s Third Ward had more turnout than there had been registered voters, said Wilbright. There were 546 election day registrations. Double-checking records, she said, left Winona County among the last in the state to report returns to St. Paul. Also, she explained, the county’s largest precinct, in St. Charles, had an usually large number of write-ins among its 1,935 voters.
An all-nighter
There was a usual delay transporting data from St. Charles, at the far end of the county, to the county seat in Winona for tabulation. That was further complicated bg a combination of the high turnout, new voters registering at the polls, and all the write-ins. “At the close of polls we still had a couple hundred absentee ballots to process,” Wilbright said. Rules would have allowed extending the process to the next day, but the decision was made to soldier through the night. Wilbright’s crew at her county auditor-treasurer office went home finally at 4:20 a.m. – after a day that began at 6 a.m. the day before.