Seven Cascade County ballot precincts going to recount
Updated Nov. 20
Ballots for seven precincts in Cascade County are heading to a recount by hand later this week as some ballots were not removed from their secrecy envelopes and incorrectly placed in boxes for discarded, and empty, secrecy envelopes.
The Cascade County canvass board, which this week includes Commissioners Joe Briggs and Jim Larson, as well as County Treasurer Diane Heikkila, initially met Nov. 18 to conduct the statutorily required process to certify election results.
During that meeting, Terry Thompson, county election administrator, asked the board to pause and reconvene until Nov. 19 since she had a 200 vote discrepancy in two statewide races.
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That issue turned out to be a typo on her part, inputting the wrong number into the tallies.
But when the board reconvened on Nov. 19, Thompson told commissioners they had a bigger problem.
She said that as she was preparing for the canvass, “I had some deep concerns over the weekend” when she discovered that some affirmation envelopes for absentee ballots that hadn’t been scanned into the system.
The affirmation envelope is the outer envelope that a voter signs and is barcoded for tracking purposes.
The ideal process is that staff scans those envelopes in daily as they’re being received but in this general election cycle with limited staffing and a large volume of people coming into the office to register, deal with missing absentee ballots or other issues, it took staff a few days to get on track with daily scanning.
Thompson said they let the phones ring to handle the lines of people at the counter and stayed at the office till midnight or later many nights scanning ballots.
Over the weekend, Thompson said she decided to open all of the affirmation envelope boxes to determine if there were envelopes that hadn’t been accepted into the system.
She said there were more than 400 such envelopes that had come in from rural polls or at Expo Park on election day.
There was one batch of envelopes that had been scanned but were mistakenly classified as undeliverable instead of accepted, and Thompson said that error was fixed immediately after it was discovered.
One batch of ballots that had been scanned but were classified undeliverable instead of accepted, when discovered that, fixed immediately
“So there was a breakdown in our system process when those ballots came to Expo Park that night,” Thompson said.
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A significant issue, Thompson said, is typically staff would cut open the affirmation envelopes and remove the secrecy envelopes, which are documented with any issues such as those missing a secrecy envelope, an empty envelope or multiple ballots stuffed into one envelope.
Standard practice has been for election officials to begin opening those affirmations and preparing the secrecy envelopes to go to judges when counting can begin.
Thompson said that due to limited resources, she decided they’d open all the affirmation envelopes at Expo Park and election judges would open the secrecy envelopes.
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Some precincts still weren’t adding up so Thompson said that on the evening of Nov. 18, she decided to open all of the secrecy envelope boxes to see if ballots were in them.
One precinct had 25 ballots in secrecy envelopes that hadn’t been taken to the tabulator, another had 12 ballots that hadn’t been counted.
Thompson determined there were seven precincts with ballots erroneously left in secrecy envelopes that hadn’t been counted on Nov. 5.
Those precincts are:
- 20B
- 21B
- 22B
- 23C
- 24A
- 24B
- 25A
Thompson said somewhere during election night, there was a breakdown in the process of staff and election judges taking the ballots out of those envelopes to be counted before putting those envelopes in a box.
“So here we are,” she said.
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Thompson said she discussed the issues with county legal staff and the Montana Secretary of State’s office and determined the canvass board had three options: to certify the results of the other precincts, review those ballots, or order a recount.
Thompson said her recommendation was to call for a recount of the seven precincts affected by those ballots left in secrecy envelopes.
Thompson said there were a total of 117 ballots that had not yet been tabulated due to the errors.
“It should be noted that the outcome of the races will not change by these ballots not being counted,” Thompson said on Nov. 20 in an email notice of the recount.
Under state law, the recount must be done by hand.
Thompson told The Electric that there are about 12,400 ballots between those seven precincts.
Nov. 19 was the statutory deadline for counties to complete their canvassses, but Thompson said the state canvass board meets on Nov. 26 and the SOS office said the county can do the recount by then to deliver the certified county results to the state board for their meeting next week.
Thompson said it took two days to do the election audit last week for three precincts, with eight to a dozen people and this recount will be double that volume.
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“Am I happy about it, absolutely not, could it have been prevented, probably, possibly. This was a perfect storm of an election. Record amount of people showing up to vote, people standing in line to vote six to eight hours, processes that were in place to try to alleviate or eliminate the amount of work after the election. We had observers directing voters to do different things at precinct tables. There was organized chaos going on that wasn’t planned and I’m not happy about it. But we got it done. And we have the opportunity to true this up so that the people can trust that the county is doing elections properly.”
Thompson said she had applied for federal grant funding that would have supported a second shift of election judges to help with the counting as the first shift of judges tired since state law requires the continuous counting of ballots until completed.
Thompson said the election count board declined that opportunity.
She said she wasn’t trying to make excuses, “but humans make errors. This was a deep error.”
Visibly upset during the meeting, Thompson said, “I apologize that this type of error even happened under my watch. The vote of confidence by the voters is extremely important and I know that does not shine light well.”
Going forward, Thompson said her office is working to put people and processes in place to prevent similar errors in the future.
Chris Christiaens, who as served as the lead count board official for years, said, “I don’t think we had enough judges, but it is extremely difficult to get judges.”
He said on the count board, there were only about three people under the age of 75.
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Christiaens said he discussed Thompson’s offer of the split shifts with the other judges beforehand who all said they were fine to work the election day shift that was more than 24 hours for some.
He said this was the first election that didn’t have all of the returned affirmation ballots opened ahead of election day and on Nov. 4, two poll workers spent the day opening the affirmation envelopes then going back through to take ballots out of the secrecy envelopes to prepare them for the tabulator.
It’s exhausting work, Christiaens said, but young people don’t volunteer and the state requirement of continuous counting is a challenge.
An aspect that caused “major, major problems were the write-ins” Christiaens said.
There were five people officially filed as write-in candidates:
- Rae Grulkowski for county commission, after losing her primary bid
- James Whitaker for House District 22, after losing his primary bid
- Shiva Ayyadurai for U.S. president
- John Metzger and Reilly Neill for U.S. House of Representatives District 2
Whitaker filed a sheet, as allowed under state law, with about 200 variations of his name spelling.
Grulkowski filed 146 variations of her name.
Christiaens said it took about seven minutes per ballot for the most experienced election judges to go through those write-in candidates and check for the name variations.
Grulkowski received 1,498 votes in the unofficial results.
“There were mistakes. I feel terrible about it. I feel responsible for that,” Christiaens said.
Commissioner Joe Briggs thanked Thompson and Christiaens for their honesty and efforts in trying to prevent and address the errors.
“It’s a difficult situation, and I understand why you both feel bad, but neither of you should be trying to take the blame for what’s happened,” Briggs said.
Several members of the public spoke thanking Thompson for her honestly but also calling for Briggs and Larson to resign since they removed election duties from Clerk and Recorder Sandra Merchant last year.
At several points, Larson told the speaker to stay on topic to which they responded by speaking over him and continuing.
One person asked how to become an election judge and Thompson said anyone interested should contact the election office to learn more and get on the list for training.
Thompson said one of her goals as election administrator is to recruit young people to serve as judges and possibly develop an internship through the colleges.
County Commissioners plan to use county employees for the recount, which is what they did in 2022 to recount the race between Merchant and Rina Moore for clerk and recorder.
The recount will begin at 2:30 p.m. Nov. 21 at Exhibition Hall and will likely go to about 10 p.m., then resume at 8 a.m. Nov. 22.
The canvass board will reconvene at 10 a.m. Nov. 25.
Thompson also updated The Electric on an issue raised by a voter the weekend before the election, concerning voters who had received the wrong ballot because the state’s ElectMT system and assigned their address to the wrong location.
Thompson said that after reviewing the issue with the state, they found 32 absentee ballots affected.
Twenty of them had voted before the issue was discovered on Nov. 1 so they’re ballots couldn’t be corrected.
Of the remaining 12, three didn’t return their ballot. Two returned theirs on Nov. 4 and the other seven voted on election day.
The mapping issue affected 21 poll voters, none of which came to the polls on Nov. 5 to vote, Thompson said.
She said she’s working with the state to correct those mapping errors to ensure voters get the correct ballot going forward.
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