When will it count? Cascade County’s Nov. 7 election results still in limbo

Nearly three weeks after all the votes were cast, and a week beyond a Montana-mandated deadline, the results of the Nov. 7 municipal elections in Cascade County still remain uncertified.

The impasse threatens to draw a rebuke from the Secretary of State’s Office and has already focused more unwanted attention of dysfunction within the Cascade County Elections Office and tensions between Cascade County commissioners.

By state law, counties across Montana are required to certify and submit their election results no later than 14-days after the conclusion of an election. That deadline expired on Nov. 21, and at this point is seems unlikely that the final election certification process will be completed before Tuesday, Nov. 28.

The most recent delay came Wednesday night on the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday. As most people were hurriedly making their way home, Cascade County Commissioners and Elections Office staff remained in commission chambers laboriously tabulating precinct returns by hand.

What happened at Nov. 22 election canvas in commission chambers?

The process began at 3:30 p.m. and lasted close to six hours but remains incomplete. The meeting was attended by a standing-room only crowd who watched as commissioners silently tabulated the election results. It was roughly equivalent to watching a board of tax preparers sift through itemized deductions, and as the night pressed on, more and more of the observers drifted away.

Sometime after 9 p.m. commissioners passed a motion to table a final vote to certify the election results until discrepancies between reports from the Cascade County Elections Office and the Secretary of State’s Office could be resolved.

“Looking at (the Secretary of State’s) report and comparing it to the tabulator machine results for the town of Belt and the town of Cascade – the numbers of ballots received did not match,” explained Commissioner Rae Grulkowski. “Commissioner Briggs made a motion to table until the Secretary of State’s Office could be reached to conclude why those numbers were different.”

The problems certifying the results of the municipal elections that took place three weeks ago is only the latest iteration of the controversy that has plagued the Cascade County Election Office since last May.

In the past, certifying elections in Cascade County has been fairly routine. Commissioners were presented with a detailed overview of the election’s results by the election administrator and given the opportunity to dig in and inspect the numbers from individual voting districts to look for any inconsistencies. They were not asked to hand tabulate dozens of pages of results and match them against machine count totals.

“Normally you would see it by precinct,” said former Cascade County commissioner Jane Weber of the canvass. “This is how many voters were eligible, this is how many ballots were sent. This is how many ballots that were returned as undeliverable, this is how many ballots were returned as voted, these are how many votes cast for each candidate.”

On Wednesday, commissioners were presented three folders, each containing dozens of pages of precinct results.

“We’ve done a little bit in the past just to check,” Webber added, “but not pages and pages of that. It never happened like that before, never.”

“In these packets are our machine results, and from those results we tally for ourselves each precinct,” Elections Administrator Sandra Merchant told commissioners at the Wednesday meeting. “What we’re looking at is doing our own tallies as law would dictate and coming to a matching conclusion as a board.”

“Why are we writing down here what we already have?” Commissioner Jim Larson asked.

“We’re verifying,” Grulkowski responded. “We’ve got to do this same process that she (Merchant) has  completed. Each board member does that.”

“Well this is something new,” Larson said. “It was explained to us that we don’t have to repeat what’s already here.”

While all votes are machine counted following closing of the polls on election night, those results do not become official until the Elections Office has cross-referenced them against individual precinct returns and then presented its conclusions to the county commissioners for a final review referred to as a “canvass.” The last step is for commissioners to certify the results, at which point they become official.

“The canvass is a process that ensures the number of ballots voted are the number of ballots counted, and that no ballots are missing or counted more than once,” the Montana Secretary of State’s Office explains.

Originally planned for Nov. 20, the municipal election canvass meeting was put on hold when commissioners Joe Briggs and Jim Larson refused to certify the election results. According to county attorney Josh Racki, the Nov. 20 meeting would have likely violated Montana open meeting laws because the public hadn’t been given enough notice.

About Montana’s open meeting laws

Montana’s open meeting laws are based on two fundamental rights contained in Montana’s Constitution; the public’s right to know and the right of citizens to participate in their government. State law demands that government agencies at all levels “develop procedures for permitting and encouraging the public to participate in agency decisions.”

Montana’s open meeting laws contain no specific notice requirement. Instead, they only demand agencies “ensure adequate notice and assist public participation before a final agency action is taken that is of significant interest to the public.”

Racki told KRTV news that for the last 18-20 years it has been the policy in Cascade County that the notice of a meeting be made public at least 48 business hours prior to the meeting coming to order. Weekends don’t count.

The notice for the proposed Nov. 20 meeting was posted late Friday afternoon, 24-hours too late to meet Cascade County’s well established open meetings policy.

After learning of the meeting’s schedule, Briggs and Larson declared they would not attend the Monday meeting because it violated the law. Without the two commissioners, Monday’s meeting would have lacked a quorum, and could therefore not certify the election results. The canvass meeting was then postponed until Wednesday, Nov. 22 to meet open meeting law requirements – and has been postponed once again to resolve discrepancies between the Secretary of State’s ballot count against those of the Cascade County Election Office.

Grulkowski, the commissioner who is serving as the chairperson, blamed the impasse on miscommunication with an office staffer for the meeting’s late scheduling.

“It was a long night and I don’t think any of us enjoyed that,” Grulkowski said of the Nov. 22 canvass meeting. “The Board of Canvassers is a work session, it’s not just a meeting. We have to actually do work.”

The failure to certify the Nov. 7 election results is indicative of a broader divide within and among Cascade County Commissioners. All three commissioners identify as Republican, yet there is a clear conflict between commissioners, with Briggs and Larson on one side and Grulkowski on the other.

At the Nov. 14 regular meeting of the commission, Larson proposed an ordinance to change how the County Commission’s chair is selected. Currently it is an automatic rotation with each commissioner serving as chair in turn.

Larson’s proposal would make the chair a position elected by a vote of all three commissioners. The second reading of Larson’s proposal will take place at the Cascade County Commission’s next regular meeting on Nov. 28.

“Our entire governmental system is based upon trust in the election process,” Briggs told KRTV. “That has been ongoing now for almost two years that we have had various groups of people questioning the integrity of the elections process. That is not something that we continue to allow. We’ve got to get things fixed. We’ve got to get things isolated from politics so that people trust that when they cast their ballot, it’s counted and it’s counted correctly.

“It started out being one section of the electorate, the far right, for lack of a better term,” Briggs added. “Now it is the folks on the Democratic side of the aisle who are questioning what’s going on. We’ve got to get to where everybody agrees that elections are safe and secure.”

“Last year and the years before it was just a – bring your cup of coffee and we’ll talk about this,” Grulkowski said of the election canvass process. “There weren’t even any motions made to approve the canvass. I knew our meetings were not proper. This year it was clumsy, but now we have a meeting that fully abides by the law for the canvass, that puts motions in place and it’s structured.

“The commissioners’ office has troubles, large troubles,” Grulkowski added. “I have asked at least twice for us to sit down and figure it out. It’s falling on deaf ears, and that should not be tolerated anywhere. There’s a lot going on here.”