Clerical errors alleged in Great Falls' municipal elections

Kalispell and Great Falls saw administrative errors in their municipal elections Tuesday, and more than one hundred voters were turned away at the Cascade County ExpoPark in Great Falls, according to a watchdog group and public information officer.

Election results have not been contested in either municipality.

The municipal election in Great Falls saw 180 voters asked to turn their ballots in at another location – a move critiqued as “unprecedented” and tantamount to voter suppression by a lawyer and longtime poll watcher.

Clerk and Recorder Sandra Merchant said no one was disenfranchised — people were told where they could vote in information her office provided with mail ballots and through the newspaper.

But at least one voter made three trips to the Elections Office to prove he resided in the city and had the right to vote.

In Kalispell, the County Elections Office is investigating after the statewide elections system ElectMT wasn’t updated with new municipal boundaries.

Election administration is under a microscope in Great Falls with an open lawsuit against Merchant in a flood and irrigation district election in May and a court appointed election monitor for the library levy election in June.

In the Electric City, 108 people went to the ExpoPark asking for voter services — like a replacement ballot due to damage or because they did not receive their original ballot or wanted to take advantage of same day voter registration — but they were asked to go to the Elections Office, according to a tally from the citizen watchdog group the Election Protection Committee.

The group said voters also brought to the ExpoPark a total of 180 filled out ballots, but they were told they could not submit them there and instead needed to go to the Elections Office, across the bridge over the Missouri River.

Jane Weber with the committee said at 4:30 p.m. the Elections Office set up a ballot drop-off box at the ExpoPark and voters put 127 ballots in the box, according to the committee’s count.

“How fair is that? One hundred and eighty ballots were turned away earlier in the day, but 127 were accepted later in the day?” Weber said.

Lawyer Raph Graybill said he’s worked as a poll watcher in Great Falls for nearly two decades and said the number of city residents being asked to go to the county annex to vote was “unprecedented.”

“It amounts to voter suppression, whether intentionally or negligently, that’s what it is,” Graybill said.

Graybill represented the Great Falls Public Library in its lawsuit requesting an election monitor earlier this year.

He said the Elections Office didn’t do enough to notify the community of the change — two notices in the Great Falls Tribune — when people have been dropping their ballots off at the ExpoPark for decades.

“Especially when at that location, there are election personnel, and there’s ballot counting,” Graybill said. “They clearly realized it’s a problem when halfway through the day they put a ballot box there.”

In an email to the Daily Montanan, Merchant disputed voters were turned away at the ExpoPark despite evidence from the watchdog group. She also said the change in location was advertised and in instructions provided with voters’ ballots.

Michael Kojetin, a professor at the University of Providence in Great Falls, told the Daily Montanan he made three separate trips to the Elections Office, with two calls to the Secretary of State’s Office, to prove he resided in city limits to get a ballot.

He said he’d received ballots at that address for city elections for more than a decade, saying his ballot being denied would have been “disenfranchisement” and an example of “taxation without representation.”

Kojetin lives at the edge of town and his house was labeled as outside city limits, when the Secretary of State’s Office assured him it was within city limits. He commended the professionalism of everyone in the Elections Office, but said the situation was unfortunate.

“I don’t think that a problem like that should have ever been a thing, but ultimately it got fixed,” he said.

He said people who didn’t have the same flexibility in their schedules as him, like his wife who teaches in the Great Falls Public Schools system, might not have had the same perseverance.

He observed other voters being told they had the same issue, though they didn’t fight it. He said he was unsure if they legitimately didn’t live in city boundaries, but said it could have signaled more people had the same problem.

The Elections Office in Kalispell is investigating after it was discovered new city ward boundaries were not added to ElectMT, the statewide elections system. However, the county assured voters their ballots were correct as the software the elections office uses to send them out was updated with the correct addresses.

Flathead County Public Information Officer Kim Grieser confirmed to the best of the county’s knowledge the administrative issue should not have affected the vote and results should be correct. She said no one has contested results as of Tuesday morning.

This story was initially published by The Daily Montanan, a nonprofit news organization and part of the States News network, covering state issues. Read more at dailymontanan.com.

This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Clerical errors alleged in Great Falls' municipal elections