A clerk and recorder who expressed doubt about the integrity of the election process during her 2022 campaign may lose her election oversight duties in a Montana county in a vote Tuesday.
Commissioners for the county are set to decide whether to remove her duties, reflecting some of the turmoil nationwide since conspiracy theories spread about the 2020 presidential election.
Dozens of people attended the meeting, which was moved to the fairgrounds in Great Falls in anticipation of public participation. If the resolution passes, it would take effect immediately. All three commissioners and the clerk, Sandra Merchant, are Republican, and she has accused Commissioner Joe Briggs of playing politics with her job.
“If you’re in the same party you should be supporting each other and working together and that has not happened,” Merchant said Monday.
Briggs said he proposed the resolution in response to complaints about the way several local elections have been run since Merchant was sworn in early this year. Lawsuits have been filed. The library board asked for court-appointed oversight for their mill levy election this summer.
“It’s been everything from people not getting ballots that should have to people who got ballots that shouldn’t have in these various elections, so there seems to be some systemic problems,” Briggs said Monday.
The issue needs to be settled before next year’s general election, Briggs said.
“We need to get all of the issues identified and fixed before we get in to federal elections, because they do have broad ramifications,” Briggs said.
Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Tester is seeking reelection in a race that could help determine the majority party in the Senate, and two U.S. House races will be on the ballot along with all the major statewide elected races, including governor.
Supporters of the motion said Tuesday morning that Merchant was in over her head and did not have the experience needed to run the elections office. Opponents said passing the resolution would disenfranchise people who voted for Merchant to be the clerk, recorder and the elections administrator.
Some opponents argued that if the change needed to be made, it should be delayed until the end of Merchant’s four-year term, which began in January.
Nationally, there have been concerns about people in position to oversee elections who have expressed doubts about or rejected the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. In some cases, local election officials have been accused of providing access to confidential voting systems in search of evidence to show elections are being manipulated.
There is no evidence of voting machines being manipulated and no indication of widespread voter fraud that would have changed the outcome of the 2020 election.
The Cascade County resolution proposes that that election oversight be removed from the clerk and recorder’s office and be assumed by the county commission, which would appoint an election administrator. State law allows for such a change and a handful of Montana’s 56 counties have done it.
Merchant defeated Democratic clerk Rina Fontana Moore by fewer than 40 votes in November 2022.
Some Republicans had asked the county commission to ask Moore to recuse herself from administrating the election since she was on the ballot, Briggs said. She declined to step down temporarily and Briggs proposed taking election duties away from the clerk and recorder’s office. However neither of the other two commission members would second his motion.
In 2021, the Republican-controlled state Legislature passed legislation leaders said was needed to improve election security, but courts rejected those laws, saying the state brought no proof of the alleged widespread voter fraud the laws sought to eliminate.
Before Merchant took office, Briggs again moved to transfer the election duties to a non-elected administrator and again, nobody else supported him..
Things changed, however, as problems piled up during this year’s elections.
“It went from being basically a structural issue, of someone in charge of an election should not be on the ballot, to broader questions about how things are being conducted here that didn’t exist previously,” Briggs said.
Merchant said after she took office, experienced employees in the elections department left without teaching her how to do the job.
She and her supporters argue Briggs’ motion is disenfranchising the people who voted for her to run elections and that the county could have done more to support her in the role.
“They weren’t electing somebody to take care of the records in the other office, they voted for me because of elections and now their votes are being thrown out,” Merchant said Monday.
Campaigning for the office as former President Donald Trump continued to make baseless allegations that widespread fraud cost him a second term, Merchant supported hand counting ballots and opening up ballot tabulators to make sure they could not be connected to the internet.
Merchant has not suggested opening tabulators or going to hand counts since she’s been elected, but her supporters haven’t given up, 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 to the currently elected Clerk and Recorder that the county’s … tabulators are Wi-Fi connected, capable of being manipulated by foreign governments or other nefarious actors, and that the only way to remove such 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.
Briggs said he was the one who made the motion to remove partisan politics from elections administration and finds it a little ironic that it was Republicans who sought the change last year when a Democrat was in office and Republicans who oppose the change now.
“From my standpoint, if you tout something because it’s the right way to do to it, then it’s the right way to do it, regardless of whether there’s a Republican or Democrat in office,” Briggs said.
