Cascade County Nov. 7 election count off by 51 votes; cited as reason for clerk's dismissal

It has been more than two weeks since Cascade County commissioners voted 2 – 1 to separate the positions of county clerk and recorder from that of elections administrator.

The passage of Resolution 23-62 stripped current Clerk and Recorder Sandra Merchant of her election responsibilities and ignited a heated uproar from her supporters who claim the commission’s vote nullified the choice of the majority of voters in the Nov. 8, 2022 general election.

“I am greatly concerned that two persons who appear to have questionable motives are removing the right of 20,000-plus people to vote for the elections administrator,” said Merchant supporter Cathy Hansen at the Dec. 26 meeting of the Cascade County Commission. “Why would two people remove such a qualified, diligent administrator before the end of the term?”

Hansen’s claim that 20,000 Cascade County voters had their votes removed is an exaggeration. According to figures from the Montana Secretary of State’s Office, Merchant received 14,342 votes for clerk and recorder during the 2022 election, beating out incumbent Rina Fontana Moore by 36 votes. The total number of registered voters in Cascade County is 47,986.

Commissioners Jim Larson and Joe Briggs, who voted to separate the duties of the elections administrator from those of clerk and recorder have noted that the vote on Nov. 8, 2022, was specifically for the position of clerk and recorder, not elections administrator, and that under Montana law, the office of elections administrator is an appointed position filled at the discretion of the Cascade County Commission.

“The county clerk and recorder of each county is the election administrator unless the governing body of the county designates another official or appoints an election administrator,” states Montana law. “The election administrator is responsible for the administration of all procedures relating to registration of electors and conduct of elections, shall keep all county records relating to elector registration and elections, and is the primary point of contact for the county with respect to the statewide voter registration list and implementation of other provisions of applicable federal law governing elections.”

However, adherence to the law and instilling voter confidence in the electoral process are two different things. Briggs said the decision to separate the duties of clerk of court from elections administrator was an issue he’d contemplated for several years preceding Merchant’s election – especially as concerns about an elections administrator managing the results of their own election mounted.

“This actually started before the election of 2022,” Briggs said on Dec. 12 of his efforts to separate the two offices. “At that point in time I was unable to get a second commissioner to support putting it on a work session. In between the election of 2022 and the swearing in of our current clerk and recorder I attempted it again.”

Additional discrepancies were reported in both the town of Belt’s municipal election and at the town of Cascade, where nearly 16% more votes were counted by the tabulator than were acknowledged by the Secretary of State’s voter confirmation database.

“There are two separate systems,” said Briggs of the vote counting process, “and they are designed to be separate to crosscheck against each other. When the ballots are received, they have to be logged into the Secretary of State’s voter database as received and valid. When a ballot comes in they scan the bar code on the outside envelope. That brings up the voter’s signature. The elections people have to verify the signature on the ballot envelope and on the computer in order to accept it. If it matches, then they accept the ballot. So, every ballot that comes in has to be checked in that fashion.”

“As the commission we are legally required to be the canvassing agents,” he added. “We were put in a position where we had to sign off on a canvass that was incomplete because we could not get the answer to why did you count 51 more votes than you show as having been accepted. Unless people don’t have a problem with more votes being counted than were legal to be counted – and I can’t understand that at all – that’s the core of the issue.”

However, Briggs assessment of the situation is not uniformly supported. Commission Chair Rae Grulkowski, who voted against Resolution 23-62, argues that the commission’s action to remove Merchant as elections administrator was rushed and denied Cascade County voters of their right to make their own decision on the issue.

“Basically, its management by crisis,” Grulkowski said. “If you’re going to make such a drastic change you have to think about these things beforehand instead of management by crisis and expect everybody to now flex into that crisis because you didn’t plan it properly. That’s what’s happening now. There was no plan, there was no method of execution. Just throw her out and let’s pick up the pieces. That is not a good way to plan for any county.”

Grulkowski pointed to Missoula County’s switch to an independent elections’ office in 2016 as a model for what should have taken place.

“They actually formed a committee while they had their elections administrator, and they held public hearings,” Grulkowski said. “They got the public involved to decide if this was something the public wanted. They created their job description; they knew what they had in their budget. They budgeted for it and then they put it in place after they had the public’s agreement. This didn’t happen that way.”

Grulkowski pointed out that by the Commission’s action the county has now created a new administrative position that was unbudgeted prior to the Dec. 12 vote. A report from the job research website Glassdoor states that the average salary for an elections administrator across the U.S. is around $50,000 annually, although wages in Montana trend lower than national averages.

“If we add additional staff, can our budget hold another person?” Grulkowski asked. “An elections administrator, that’s training, that’s reestablishing your foundation with your staff. I don’t know if we have that time. I think this was all inappropriate. It was not thought out before it was done.”

“I don’t think continuing with a system that is not working, which is what we had in that last canvass, is the answer,” Briggs responded. “If you find a problem you have to address it. The only way we could address it was removing elections from the Clerk and Recorder. As commissioners we have no authority over how other elected officials run their day-to-day operations. The only reason we could do anything was that state law specifically allows us to remove the elections duties from the Clerk and Recorder. So, we exercised that.”

Time is short. Filings for trustee of the Great Falls school district began the day after Merchant was dismissed. That election is scheduled to take place on May 7, 2024, followed less than a month later when the Montana primary elections are scheduled to occur on June 4, 2024. Filing for candidates for the 2024 general election begins Jan. 11 and ends on March 11, 2024.

“The school board elections opened their filing for candidates on the 13th of December, the day after Sandra Merchant’s duties were taken from her,” Grulkowski said. “We had some candidates come in to file for the school board but we couldn’t do anything with those declarations for nomination because we didn’t have an elections administrator.”

That initial problem has since been resolved. At a meeting on Dec. 22 the commissioners voted unanimously to appoint Dev Biddick as the interim election administrator pending the hiring of a permanent official.

“We seated the interim elections administrator last Friday,” said Cascade Commissioner Jim Larson on Tuesday. “She was the elections specialist for Sandra, so we voted her to the interim position.”

“Those kind of things are ready to go,” Briggs said of the immediate elections process. “We simply had to have a person authorized by the Secretary of State’s office to handle those. The bigger issues are getting election judges trained. All of that has to happen, but we can’t actually appoint election judges until after the first of the year by state law. It’s going to be a little compressed, but if we get applications from people who actually have the experience we should be in good order.”

Brigg’s optimism has yet to be tested. What is certain is that Cascade County’s election process will move forward with or without voter confidence in the process.

This article originally appeared on Great Falls Tribune: Cascade clerk Sandra Merchant stripped of election role over vote count