Cascade County certifies Nov. 5 election results
Cascade County officials certified the Nov. 5 election results during an hours long canvass on Nov. 25 after some delays and a hand recount of seven precincts after some ballots had been misplaced.
The canvass board included County Commissioners Joe Briggs and Jim Larson, and County Treasurer Diane Heikkila.
The canvass was initially scheduled for last week but was delayed when Terry Thompson, county election administrator, discovered that some ballots had never been removed from their secrecy envelopes and were mistakenly placed in a box of discarded secrecy envelopes and were never run through the tabulator.
Thompson said those 117 ballots were in seven precincts but did not impact the results of any race.
Thompson said that she didn’t open those secrecy envelope boxes herself, but with four county employees and cameras watch the election areas.
She said they had to weigh the options of just counting those 117 ballots or all of those precincts, which was the guidance from the county attorney’s office.
The county began the handcount that was conducted by county employees on Nov. 21.
“The 117 votes did not change any race, it did not bring any race within the percentage to have a recount,” Thompson told the canvass board during their Nov. 25 meeting.
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During the meeting, Thompson said she was going to take a moment to make a public comment sits she has to sit at the table during meetings and listen to the public accuse her and elections staff of various things.
Thompson said she’d been provided a copy of an email from a local group dubbed Five for Five, which she said included people who often come in to the elections office accusing Thompson and her staff of various misdeeds.
“I’m gonna fight back when people talk about the job I’m doing,” Thompson said.
She said that in the email and in a public meeting, she was accused of refusing to provide a document requested by a citizen.
Thompson said that she told the citizen she’d have to wait for the document until Thompson was finished preparing for the canvass and that the citizen has since been provided the document.
Thompson said she was accused of not correctly testing the tabulator, which was done during a public test for both the primary and general election and Thompson said she provided those results to the state, at which point, the group didn’t raise concerns.
Thompson said the email stated that Rina Fontana Moore, the previous county clerk and recorder, had been hired as a consultant for the Nov. 5 election.
Thompson said that she did not hire Moore as a consultant, but did call Moore for advice.
“I did call Rina, I am not a fool, I am going to reach out to the people who did the job for 16 years,” Thompson said.
Thompson said that Commissioner Rae Grulkowski called her many times for leadership advice before she was hired as the election administrator and later asked why she didn’t call Clerk and Recorder Sandra Merchant for advice.
In December 2023, commissioners voted 2-1 to remove election duties from Merchant following a turbulent year regarding elections.
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Thompson said that Merchant had never run a presidential election and that she didn’t run the Nov. 5 election exactly the same way Moore had in the past.
She said they knew it would be a big election with many people turning out to vote and tried to reduce the number of provisional ballots that would be issued as those would slow the process.
Thompson said she held a orientation and refresher for election judges the week before the election in an attempt to reduce issues.
On election day, she said poll watchers got involved “obstructing our election” by giving voters instructions to bypass the line and go straight to precinct tables to vote.
Cascade County wasn’t the only Montana county with problems and long lines on Nov. 5 and she said the last registration was about 4 a.m. in Gallatin County compared to midnight in Cascade.
She said every election administrator in the state did their best and no one was appropriately staffed.
Thompson said she was accused of working with Moore’s “crony,” Lynn DeRoche.
“The crony is here, I hired her back. She has 16 years experience,” Thompson said, and that she’d inherited Merchant’s staff, who were friends of Merchant and Grulkowski.
DeRoche was hired earlier this month, after the election, through the county’s normal hiring process, according to multiple county officials.
Thompson said when she took the position, she sat those staffers down and said if they intended to spy or be partisan, they could leave.
“Here’s the problem, I was supposedly Rae’s girl so I could be puppeteered like Sandra was puppeteered,” Thompson said. “That’s not happening with me.”
She said she’s worked to keep politics out of the elections office and came to commissioners earlier in the year to add more staff into her budget. Since elections is now a department under the commission, Thompson doesn’t have the same staff resources that Merchant or Moore had as clerk and recorder.
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Thompson said she needed more help with pre-election activities so she had election judges in the office helping and initially, she had three employees from the Clerk and Recorder’s office processing ballots for about a week until Commissioner Rae Grulkowski mentioned in a special commission meeting that county employees should not be helping with elections office.
“My jaw hit the table,” Thompson said when she heard Grulkowski make that comment.
She said those three employees declined to continue helping “because they felt threatened” and didn’t help with the recount either.
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“Maybe I was being sabotaged by Sandra Merchant and Rae Grulkowski,” she said, and that the staff hired under Merchant weren’t properly handling ballot stubs or tracking ballots as they were returned and she has since instituted changes.
Thompson said her office had issues with the post office not delivering ballots on time or at all in some cases, though the post office has said everything was delivered.
She said her office had to reissue about 1,000 ballots that weren’t delivered by the post office.
Coming into the office in February, Thompson said that staff handed her a check that had been sitting in the office for six months from the Gore Hill water district to pay their election expenses and she was called by the city asking about their invoice for their November 2023 election that was eventually handled in July, which was the next fiscal year for the city.
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“There’s a lot of mudslinging going on,” Thompson said, and “I’m sick and tired of being under the shadow of Sandra Merchant.”
She said that a number of Merchant and Grulkowski supporters, including those who’d signed a petition two years ago asking the county to eliminate mail ballots, were calling election judges asking questions trying to get information.
Later in the meeting, some of those people Thompson named said they didn’t think it was acceptable for Thompson to scold them as a public official. Others Thompson named spoke during the Nov. 26 meeting to say they didn’t appreciate her comments and that she should apologize. Several repeated their calls for Briggs and Larson to resign during the canvass.
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Thompson said she’d had disagreements with Briggs and Larson over the years, as had her husband who served on the county fair board until commissioners disbanded the board, but that they had supported her in the election administrator role.
The canvass board went through the canvass report and ballot numbers for about two hours before Briggs move to certify the results, which was approved unanimously.
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Nancy Donovan, who works for the U.S. Postal Service and applied for the election administrator position earlier this year, said that she was opposed to certifying the results because she had questions of some ballots.
Grulkowski rose to the podium during public comment and called Thompson’s comments a “tantrum” and “reprehensible. The outburst is a byproduct of a broken commission office.”
She said little was done to inform the public about the November election and that a citizen had asked that a public meeting be scheduled about election security but that didn’t happen.
“Cascade county has a terrible reputation amongst other Montana counties,” Grulkowski said and reminded county officials and employees that they serve the public.
Rina Fontana Moore, who served as county clerk and recorder and the election administrator for 16 years before being defeated by Merchant by 31 votes in 2022, spoke after the canvass and said her office was “terrorized” by a group of locals in 2022 and it continued for Thompson this year.
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Moore said her her staff was competent to handle elections and had done so in one case when her father got sick and died three weeks before a school election.
She said she’d often been accused of nepotism but watched Merchant hire her friends, all of whom had signed the petition asking the county to eliminate mail ballots and require hand counts, and one who had dressed in camo harassing staff in 2022 and had been removed from the election hall for violating the behavior requirements she signed to work that election.
In defense of Thompson, Moore said, “do I think that she was sabotaged, I absolutely do.”
