Scanned vote totals from special and general elections going back nearly a century are available on the new Minnesota Elections: Dates and Vote Totals page on the Legislative Reference Library’s website.
October 18 marks the next legislative special election. Who won in past special elections? That information has been available on the Library’s Special Elections Web page for some time. Who won in the general elections? You can search by legislative session in the Library’s Legislators Past & Present database.
But what were the vote totals? Who ran and lost? Previously, finding that information required looking up the results of individual races in the Legislative Manuals. Now it's online, the fruits of a long-term project. Legislative Library staff have scanned election results from the Legislative Manuals and made them available in a sortable, useful table.
The table entries link to scans of the Legislative Manual pages, saved as PDF files. The files were made with optical character recognition software, so each can be searched for names. The search results will be imperfect; sometimes the font or faintness of the print meant that words were not detected by the software.
Additions to the table are planned, as we find time. We will add general election primary results. We have identified some special election primary results, too, but they are often difficult to find. We will add a search function across all the years.
Let us know if you find the table useful, or if you find any errors.