County Commissioners continued their canvass of the November municipal election during a Nov. 29 meeting.
They’d started the canvass on Nov. 22, but after a five and a half hour meeting, voted to table to the decision as Commissioner Joe Briggs said they were missing information needed to reconcile the numbers.
During the Nov. 29 meeting, Briggs said that he still had questions about the numbers.
He said the new pages of numbers that Clerk and Recorder Sandra Merchant provided for the Nov. 29 meeting differed from those she provided during the first meeting.
Briggs said he was comfortable with the Belt and Cascade town council election results with the information provided for the Nov. 29 canvass meeting, but he still had questions about the Great Falls election, particularly neighborhood councils.
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He said that in the reports provided for the first meeting, by precinct, it showed 51 more votes ran through the tabulator than the elections office accepted into the state system. He said the new numbers had narrowed that gap to 32.
Briggs and Merchant went back and forth for a few minutes trying to address his questions.
“You could keep playing around with these numbers if you wanted to and come up with different numbers every time,” Merchant said.
Briggs and Merchant continued discussing a discrepancy he was seeing in the numbers and she said there should be a page with the numbers in his packet.
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He said he didn’t have it and was specifically concerned because one neighborhood council was entirely write-in candidates and the difference between the fifth and sixth person was one vote. The top five vote getters are elected to neighborhood councils.
Any differences in what was run through the machine, versus ballots recorded in the state system, is “problematic, because we don’t have any granular data for neighborhood councils,” he said.
The neighborhood council votes were split between precincts, so Briggs said the needed a more specific breakdown of the numbers to ensure the number of votes going through the tabulator matched the number of ballots being returned.
Merchant told him tabulator reports showed vote totals and how many voters per neighborhood council.
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Briggs said he wanted to see those council totals.
Merchant said there were no other reports and “it is time to move on with the canvass.”
She said if he wanted to come look in ElectMT, the state voter system, he could request that later but that she had met the requirements for what needed to be provided for the canvass.
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Briggs said that differed from what the Montana Secretary of State’s office sent him in writing earlier in the day.
He said Merchant just told him she had a different sheet of numbers but he didn’t have it.
She said she’d give it to him later.
Briggs said he couldn’t vote on the canvass without those numbers.
Merchant left the meeting to go get other sheets of paper from her office down the hall.
Sher returned with another set of papers, showed it to Briggs, then sat back down with it.
Carey Ann Haight, chief deputy civil attorney, said that if the board was relying on those numbers as part of the canvass, they needed copies to go with their materials.
Briggs said the new papers helped answer some of his questions, but “I remain very concerned about the lack of granular data” that the SOS office told him they could help Merchant gather.
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He said he was comfortable with most races, other than the one neighborhood council, and would reluctantly move to accept the results that had been presented.
Richie Melby, spokesman for the Montana Secretary of State, told The Electric late Nov. 27 that to his knowledge there “has been no recent correspondence from the Cascade County elections office to our office regarding their County Canvass. In fact, it was only through media inquiries such as yours I was made aware the county was still looking to complete its statutorily required canvass. At an initial glance, it appears there are no outstanding tickets from Cascade County elections and all previous tickets have been addressed. SOS officials will be reaching out to Cascade County to request an update on their County Canvass and their plans to complete the process, if it hasn’t been already, as required by statute.”
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Several members of the public said during the meeting that the canvass of the November municipal election was the first that had been done according to state law, insinuating that all previous canvass had been conducted improperly, to include two canvasses conducted this year under Merchant.
Briggs told The Electric, ” I do not believe that the canvases that have been conducted for the last 19 years were illegal. They matched with the training that I had received and were the general practice in all of the counties whose process I was familiar with. There were no concerns raised over the canvass process we were using by the SOS, the county attorney or the public until after the 2020 election.”
