HELENA — Leaders say it appears some test data that wasn’t properly cleared led to an overcount of more than 1,000 votes in Butte-Silver Bow County during this year’s primary election.
Now, a legislative committee investigating the incident is looking at what can be done to keep it from happening again.
Montana Senate leaders created the Senate Select Committee on Elections last month after a court ordered a recount to clarify the suspected overcount.
That recount was completed two weeks ago — removing an extra 1,131 votes from the county’s total, but not making many significant changes to the primary results.
The winner flipped in one vote for a Republican precinct committee member, and the leading candidate for county attorney changed — though both candidates are still moving on to the general election.
Tuesday was the select committee’s first meeting, though members had been in Butte observing the recount just days after they were appointed.
Sen. Mike Cuffe, R-Eureka, chairs the committee. He says everyone involved understands the importance of getting Montana’s elections right.
“This has been absolutely the heaviest burden that I have felt since I've been in the Legislature, going back to 2011,” he said.
On Tuesday, Butte-Silver Bow clerk and record Linda Sajor-Joyce gave a presentation to the committee, laying out what she believes happened.
In the vast majority of the county’s precincts, the overcount was exactly 33 votes. Sajor-Joyce believes that was leftover data from the sample ballots they ran through their tabulators during a public test a few days before the election.
In three precincts, there were 65 extra votes. Sajor-Joyce says, looking back at the reports from their election software, it appears that happened because an election official accidentally plugged the memory stick containing the test data back into the computer reporting the total votes, when they were supposed to plug in a different stick to set up the system.
She said they stopped it when they realized it was the wrong memory stick, but 32 sample ballots for each of those three precincts were counted again.
“Their only out at that point would have been to clear the machine and reload the data, and that did not happen,” said Sajor-Joyce.
Sajor-Joyce said there was one precinct with 44 extra votes, and they were not able to determine specifically where the remaining 11 votes came from. She said, most likely, one batch of 11 ballots was run through the tabulator twice.
Austin James, director of elections and chief legal counsel for Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen’s office, says Sajor-Joyce contacted him about a week before the state’s ballot certification deadline, letting him know it appeared they had overcounted ballots. He said they determined the only way to try to correct the results at that stage would be through litigation.
James said the procedure followed in this case was unusual and not accounted for in state statute.
“Whether or not the petition would be granted was certainly a question at the time, but doing nothing was not an option to me – and, frankly, the Silver Bow County election administrator felt the exact same way,” he said. “They want the results right, we want no cast on it.”
Cuffe said lawmakers appreciated the transparency election officials have demonstrated and the work done during the recount, though committee members still have questions about how it got to this point.
The committee is now turning to what recommendations they can make, to resolve the issues that led to this error.
Sajor-Joyce said Butte-Silver Bow will look at ways to improve labeling, to make it clearer which memory stick is which and which ballots have already been run.
She said they’d like to see additional fail-safes in the election software to address things like running a memory stick that has already been read, and more training so election officials have a better understanding of the machines they’re using.
Regina Plettenberg, Ravalli County’s clerk and recorder and a leader with the state association of election administrators, said election officials understand more needs to be done to make sure issues like this are caught at the county canvass, earlier in the process.
She also said there may need to be a change to state law to account for a situation like this, discovered late.
“There's just not a good avenue for election administrators to say, ‘I made a mistake, we need to do a recount, or we need to even maybe redo an election,’” Plettenberg said.
Earlier this year, Kalispell had to redo a city council election after voters received the wrong ballots because updated ward lines hadn’t been entered into the system.
Cuffe said the committee will be talking more about possible law changes at their next meeting in October.
“The process that we’re in does not end today,” he said.
During Tuesday’s meeting, the committee heard public testimony from a number of people who expressed broader concerns about election integrity and said many Montanans have lost trust in the election system. They called for more extensive auditing of the results from ballot tabulators.
