County continuing election canvass
Cascade County Commissioners met for five and a half hours the Wednesday before Thanksgiving to review the Nov. 7 election results.
After each commissioner sat quietly doing math for about five hours and another half hour of discussion, Commissioner Joe Briggs moved to table their decisions since he didn’t have enough information to verify the numbers Clerk and Recorder Sandra Merchant had presented.
At noon on Nov. 27, the county scheduled the next canvass meeting for 1:30 p.m. Nov. 29.
Briggs said that historically, the canvass board had been provided a report from the Montana voter registration system showing the number of ballots received back and acknowledged into the system during the signature verification of ballots received by mail.
County conducting election canvass for Nov. 8 general election
The report is also supposed to show the number of ballots accepted at the polls for in person balloting, so that the canvass board can verify the number of ballots received matches the number of ballots run through the tabulator, Briggs said.
Commissioner Jim Larson said of the information presented during the Nov. 22 canvass that “this is something kind of new.”
Commissioner Rae Grulkowski said they were following the law and that it was the job of the canvass board to do the math themselves based on the reports provided by Merchant.
County Commissioners at odds over chair selection process
For the last decade, election canvasses had been short, routine and rarely attended by the public. There had been few issues with the returns and no public complaints about the integrity of local elections in Cascade County until last year when a group of Republicans came to commissioners saying there were issues in local elections, particularly the 2020 election, during which some of those raising concerns won their public offices and during which Donald Trump won in Cascade County and Montana.
Since Merchant and Grulkowski won during the 2022 election, this year, a group of Democrats have actively raised concerns with integrity of local elections and have called for election duties to be removed from Merchant’s office.
In November 2022, Briggs suggested separating election duties into a stand alone county department with a staff administrator, but that conversation stalled this year.
Earlier this year, the Great Falls Public Schools board asked county commissioners to remove election duties from Merchant’s office but officials have not taken any official action on the request.
A deep divide has developed between Grulkowski on one side and Briggs and Larson on the other, though they’re all Republicans.
Grulkowski has said she’s asked for sit down meetings but been denied. Any meeting of two or more commissioners constitutes a quorum and requires a public meeting. The commissioners held additional meetings earlier this year to help get Grulkowski up to speed and held additional budget meetings at her request over the summer.
During their Nov. 28 meeting, commissioners will take final action on a proposal from Larson to change how the commission chair is selected. Grulkowski is currently serving as chair and the other two commissioners have expressed frustration at how she’s managing those duties.
Elections office addresses duplicate ballots, other election questions
During the canvass on Nov. 22, Merchant said she had other reports she could show the commissioners, “since I had not been able to get an answer to my early question regarding the number of ballots returned as compared to the number counted per precinct, I asked to see those reports,” Briggs said.
He said when he received them, they were the reports he was looking for but weren’t run broken down by precinct, “so I could not quickly check compare the received versus counted totals except for the Belt and Cascade which were run separately by precinct.”
In those cases, the state voter system showed that 117 ballot shad been accepted for counting, but the tabulator reported five ballots had been run, five more than were verified into the system for the Belt town council election, Briggs said.
Merchant responds to GFPS letter asking that elections duties be removed from her office
In the Town of Cascade council election, the state report showed 140 ballots had been accepted for counting, but the tabulator reports from Merchant’s office showed 162 ballots having been counted, 22 more than had been verified in the state system.
“When I presented this information to her, Sandra speculated that there may be a different report that she needed to run but was not sure, so I moved to table the canvas so that she could look into the differences between the ballots received into the system and the number counted,” Briggs said.
He said he was taking time Nov. 27 to go through the Great Falls election numbers to see if there are similar discrepancies between the state’s voter reports and what the Cascade County elections office reported.
GFPS asks county to remove election duties from clerk and recorder’s office
The canvass had initially been scheduled for Nov. 20, but Briggs and Commissioner Jim Larson said they wouldn’t attend what constituted an illegal meeting since it lacked the required 48-hour public notice.
Merchant’s office said they were trying to meet the 14-day requirement to hold the canvass after the Nov. 7 election.
State law does not specify whether that 14 days is calendar or business days, nor has any county official or the Montana Secretary of State’s office answered The Electric’s question on the matter.
If it was calendar days, that put the canvass deadline at Nov. 21. If it doesn’t count weekends and holidays, just as the public notice requirement doesn’t, that puts the deadline at Nov. 28.
The law doesn’t indicate consequences for not meeting that deadline and the SoS has not yet responded to questions about what happens if counties don’t meet that deadline.
There’s been some discussion about the 48-hour requirement, which is widely adhered to by local governments and was addressed in a 1998 Montana Attorney General opinion.
“Forty-eight hours is generally considered sufficient to notify the public of contemplated action…The amount of notice given should increase with the relative significance of the decision to be made,” according to the 1998 AG decision.
Merchant responds to GFPS letter asking that elections duties be removed from her office
State law specifically states that “two days posted public notice” is required for county commissioners to meet at a time or place that differs from their normal and adopted by resolution meeting time and place.
For this canvass, the county website notification sent an alert at 4:38 p.m. Nov. 17 that the election canvass with commissioners had been scheduled for 3:30 p.m. Nov. 20.
At 12:03 p.m. Nov. 20, The Electric emailed to ask Sandra Merchant whether that meeting was still on since it didn’t meet the 48-hour notice requirement, as well as follow up on election related questions from a Nov. 10 email that had gone unanswered. The Electric has not yet received a response.
At 1:29 p.m. Nov. 20, The Electric emailed commissioners to ask about whether the meeting was on due to the lack of 48-hours notice, and whether an agenda and associated documents for the meeting would be publicly available.
State approves Merchant’s Nov. 7 election plan
Commissioner Jim Larson responded at 1:56 p.m. to say the meeting was canceled since it wasn’t noticed correctly.
At 2:05 p.m. Nov. 20, the county website notification system sent an alert that the canvass had been moved to Nov. 22 at 3:30 p.m.
