Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen emailed Cascade County Commissioners in February urging them not to rehire Rina Fontana Moore or a member of her past team for the election administrator position.

Commissioners met Feb. 15 to select their hire for the newly created election administrator position.

On Feb. 6, they interviewed four candidates for the position: Rina Fontana Moore, Lynn DeRoche, Nancy Donovan and Terry Thompson.

Moore was the county clerk and recorder until November 2022, when she was defeated by 31 votes by Sandra Merchant.

DeRoche had been the election supervisor under Moore for years.

On Feb. 15, commissioners selected Thompson, who had scored highest in their ranking matrix.

In December 2023, commissioners voted 2-1 to remove election duties from the clerk and recorder’s office after Merchant’s first year in office was plagued with election errors, citizen complaints and multiple lawsuits.

Commissioner Joe Briggs had suggested removing election duties from the clerk’s office before the November 2022 election, but said he didn’t have support from the other two commissioners at the time.

Cascade County elections garnered statewide attention in 2023 and became a hotly debated political issue.

On Feb. 14, from her state email account, Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen wrote to all three county commissioners.

Jacobsen wrote, “please do not hire Ms. Moore or a member of her administration as Cascade County’s Election Administrator. Doing so would directly undermine the voters of Cascade County, among other reasons.”

The Electric was alerted to the email by a reader and obtained the email through a records request last week.

The Electric emailed Jacobsen to ask if she meant the email as a personal public comment or in her role as a state official and whether she had offered similar comment to other counties when selecting their non-elected election administrators.

Jacobsen has not responded.

On March 1, The Electric was in the Capitol Rotunda for an event with the Montana National Guard and observed  Merchant and Commissioner Rae Grulkowski walk in to Jacobsen’s office for about 20 minutes.

Asked if their visit was county business or their trip funded by taxpayers, Merchant and Grulkowski have not yet responded to The Electric.

County Commissioner Jim Larson said Jacobsen’s email didn’t influence his decision in hiring for the election administrator position.

But, “I was really shocked when we got it. That the Secretary of State would send something like that,” he said.

Larson and Commissioner Joe Briggs said their county attorney’s office contacted the SOS legal office about the email, and they said the SOS has a first amendment right to make the comment.

“But then she shouldn’t use the state seal to do it,” Larson said. “She was trying to influence us, but it didn’t influence my decision. I didn’t know what she was doing.”

Commissioner Joe Briggs said Jacobsen’s email didn’t influence his hiring decision either as they used a structured scoring system to rate the candidates during interviews.

But he also said he was surprised by Jacobsen’s email.

“It came as an official email but it contained no facts. It alluded to some reason Rina or Lynn shouldn’t be hired,” he said.

“I took it as a personal political statement that was done inappropriately,” Briggs said, adding that it shouldn’t have been sent via an official state email.

Thompson, who started as the election administrator on Feb. 21, said that she’d had no contact with Jacobsen prior to being hired.

“She’s never contacted me and I’ve never met or spoken to her, ever,” Thompson told The Electric.

Thompson said she had numerous interactions with SOS election staff regarding training and resolving issues they’ve had within ElectMT, the state voter registration system.

Thompson said SOS election staff would be in Cascade County March 12-13 to provide training to her and the county election staff.

Lee Banville, director of the University of Montana School of Journalism and a political analyst, told The Electric that many of the election administrator positions in Montana are elected positions and if the SOS was endorsing a candidate in those instances, “that would certainly be weird.”

He said he couldn’t recall any former SOS or the current one making similar statements in county hiring decisions.

“To say it’s unusual is probably an understatement. I’ve never heard of anything like that,” Banville said. “It’s a very political statement.”

He said her email wasn’t a recommendation but stated that two candidates should be rejected outright and was an instance of a state official getting involved in local government decisions.

Banville said that Montanans like the idea of local control and counties are often left to their own devices on many matters, so to have a state official making comments in a local hiring decision, “is unusual at a minimum and maybe inappropriate.”

Bret Rutherford, former election administrator in Yellowstone County, said “it is pretty shocking that a statewide elected official would use their office to try and influence a non-elected staff position at the county level. The fact that someone once held office or previously worked in the department should not bar them from applying for a job they feel they are qualified to do. At the very least, I would call this unethical. I am also curious as to what ‘among other reasons’ means.”

Yellowstone County has a non-elected elections administrator, a position Rutherford held from 2010 until he resigned in the fall of 2022.

Yellowstone County Commissioners then appointed his replacement, Ginger Aldrich.

John Ostlund, Yellowstone County Commissioner, told The Electric that while making that hire, “we did not reach out for help nor did anyone contact us with any advice.”