GFPS alleges lack of communication from Elections Office as school board election delayed

Voting was delayed early Tuesday morning in the Great Falls Public Schools Board of Trustees election due to what school district officials are saying was a lack of communication from the Cascade County Elections Office.

Voting was delayed by an hour on Tuesday, poll watcher and former Cascade County Commissioner Jane Weber told the Daily Montanan.

Three GFPS board seats were up for election Tuesday, with incumbent trustees Bill Bronson, Kim Skornogoski and Amie Thompson running for reelection and candidates Rodney Meyers and Tony Rosales challenging for board seats.

The delay had to do with a box of "registers," according to a statement sent out by the district Tuesday, which was brought to the attention of the school district on Thursday of last week. GFPS Superintendent Tom Moore said he was contacted by county Clerk and Recorder Sandra Merchant by email, telling him that the voter “registers” were nearly ready to be picked up by the district.

Moore said no further context was added to the email, but he responded: “Thank you, when the registers are ready, please let us know, and (GFPS Clerk of the Board of Trustees) Brian Patrick will come down and pick them up.”

Merchant again contacted Moore over the weekend by email stating: “The registers were ready but your email had gone to junk mail again. Someone will be here all day on Monday so whenever is convenient for Patrick to get them they are ready,” according to a GFPS release.

“We had no idea what a register was when we got this email from her last week,” Moore told the Tribune in an interview. “Brian (Patrick) went and picked up this box of ‘registers,’ quote-unquote, on Monday and brought them back up here to the district office. When we looked at them, they looked like copies of the voters who were registered in Cascade County, and each of the binders probably represented a precinct. We just looked at it and wondered why we received them and put them back in the boxes and in the vault, and figured after the elections if we needed to reference them for any reason, we’d have the voter lists.”

On Tuesday morning, Moore said his office was contacted by Merchant at 7:10 a.m. asking where the voter registration lists were, as the Elections Office could not begin the voting process without them.

The forms were delivered by Patrick to the election site at Exhibition Hall at Montana ExpoPark before 7:30 a.m., Moore said, adding that the officials who collected them did not provide any further explanation.

Merchant told the Tribune on Tuesday that school districts are required by Montana law to take possession of the voter registration lists prior to a school election and deliver them back to the election office in time on election day.

“And they did not do that,” Merchant said.

Merchant said there could have been some confusion on the part of the district as this election was held in-person as opposed to by mail-in ballot in the past.

The Elections Office did not provide any instruction on returning the “registers,” Moore said, or say why the district needed to take possession of them.

“There was no communication with the Elections Office regarding what the binders in this box were all about,” Moore said. “They handed them over to us with no explanation. In the past, there have been advocacy groups that have asked for the lists of registered voters and absentee voters by precinct so they can do research. That’s public information that you can request … but our district has not done that in the past.”

In response to Merchant’s claim that the district was required by state law to take possession of the voter registration lists and return them on election day, Moore reiterated to the Tribune it was something neither he nor Patrick, the longtime GFPS board clerk, had ever dealt with in the past.

“It is not a law that either Mr. Patrick, our clerk of our board who has been an educator in the state of Montana for over 40 years, and a (former) superintendent – he is a career administrator in the state of Montana and well-versed in school law, and has conducted and overseen school elections in our district as the clerk of the board for the last 12 years, and is in constant contact with the (Montana) Office of Public Instruction and their elections advisor – we’ve been in constant contact with her for the past few months over this election fray – no one, no one has mentioned any statutory requirement for us to take possession of these registers prior to any election. Never. And there was no mention of that in the communique last Thursday.”

Merchant is a Republican who defeated longtime Clerk and Recorder Rina Moore in a close race last November. She announced in March that a mail-ballot election was not possible, the Daily Montanan reported, and that the election would be conducted at the polls or by absentee ballot.

A newly formed group called the Election Protection Committee filed a formal ethics complaint with the Montana Commissioner of Public Practices in late April against Merchant, Cascade County Commission Chair Rae Grulkowski, and Cascade County Election Specialist Devereaux Biddick, according to the Daily Montanan.

The complaint alleged electioneering by the Elections Office in regards to the June 6 library levy, deliberately obstructing the view of elections observers when absentee ballots were sent out for the school board election on April 17, among other allegations.

The complaint was rejected by COPP, the Daily Montana reported Tuesday.

Results of the GFPS school board election were not immediately available late Tuesday evening. Check greatfallstribune.com for updates.

Grady Higgins can be reached at ghiggins@greatfallstribune.com. Photo was provided courtesy of Matt Ehnes of Jared's Detours.

This article originally appeared on Great Falls Tribune: Great Falls Public Schools Board of Trustees election delayed