Montana county to vote on removing election oversight duties from elected official

Commissioners in a Montana county are expected to vote Tuesday on whether to eliminate the election oversight duties of a clerk and recorder who raised questions about the integrity of the election process when she ran for office last year.

The Cascade County Commission meeting was moved to the Great Falls Fairgrounds to accommodate planned public participation. If the resolution is approved, it would take effect immediately.

Commissioner Joe Briggs proposed the resolution, noting that since Sandra Merchant was sworn in earlier this year, the county has received complaints about the way several local elections have been conducted. Lawsuits have been filed. The library board requested court-appointed oversight of its mill tax election this summer.

“There’s been everything from people not getting the ballots they should have to people getting votes they shouldn’t have in these various elections, so there appear to be some systemic issues,” Briggs said Monday.

The issue must be resolved before next year’s general election, Briggs said.

“We need to identify and fix all the problems before we get to the federal election, because they have wide ramifications,” Briggs said.

Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester is seeking re-election in a race that could help determine the majority party in the Senate; Two House races will be on the ballot along with all major statewide elected races, including governor.

The resolution proposes that that election oversight be removed from the clerk and recorder’s office and taken over by the county commission, which would appoint an election administrator. State law allows the change, and a handful of Montana’s 56 counties have done so.

During the 2022 campaign for clerk and recorder, some Republicans asked the county commission to ask Democratic Clerk Rina Fontana Moore to recuse herself from administering the election since she was on the ballot, Briggs said. She refused to temporarily resign, and Briggs proposed removing election functions from the office of the clerk and recorder. However, neither of the other two members of the commission supported her motion.

Merchant defeated Moore by fewer than 40 votes in November 2022, months after the Republican-controlled state Legislature passed several laws he said were needed to improve election security. However, courts rejected those laws, saying the state failed to present evidence of the alleged widespread voter fraud that the laws sought to eliminate.

Before Merchant took office, Briggs again decided to transfer election duties to an unelected administrator and, again, no one else supported him. All three commissioners are Republicans.

However, things changed with this year’s elections.

“It went from basically being a structural question that someone in charge of an election shouldn’t be on the ballot to broader questions about how things are being run here that didn’t exist before,” Briggs said.

Merchant said that after he took over, experienced elections department employees left without teaching him how to do the job.

She maintains that Briggs’ motion is disenfranchising the people who voted for her from participating in the election.

“They didn’t pick anyone to do the records at the other office, they voted for me because of the election and now their votes are being thrown out,” Merchant said Monday.

Merchant campaigned on election integrity, supporting opening ballot tabulators to ensure they couldn’t connect to the Internet and advocating for hand-counting ballots as former President Trump leveled baseless accusations that there was widespread fraud that cost him his jobs. 2020 election. Merchant has not suggested opening tabulators or conducting hand recounts since she was elected, Briggs said.

In the resolution, Briggs wrote that the county recently spent $200,000 on ballot tabulators and “has received persistent criticism and concerns from certain members of the public who are politically aligned with the currently elected Clerk and Recorder that the…county tabulators are not “They are Fi connected, capable of being manipulated by foreign governments or other nefarious actors, and that the only way to eliminate those fears is for Cascade County to open the tabulators for public inspection.”

However, doing so would void warranties and render the tabulators worthless, he said.

Merchant maintains that Briggs is playing politics with his work.

“If they are in the same party they should support each other and work together and that has not happened,” he said.

Briggs said he introduced the motion to remove partisan politics from election administration and finds it a bit ironic that it was Republicans who sought the change last year when a Democrat was in office and Republicans oppose the change now.

“In my view, if you promote something because it’s the right way to do it, then it’s the right way to do it, regardless of whether there’s a Republican or a Democrat in office,” Briggs said.