HELENA — With Election Day just a few days away, county election officials across Montana are gearing up for their work in counting the ballots – but they’re doing that work under new rules, put in place by the state Legislature last year, that are requiring some counties to adjust their procedures.
“They had an impact in the primary, but they'll have a larger impact in the general election,” said Missoula County elections administrator Bradley Seaman.
In previous elections, counties sometimes counted votes until after midnight, then took a break and returned in the morning. That’s now going to change, because of House Bill 196, passed and signed into law during the 2023 legislative session.
HB 196 says, once counties start tabulating votes on Election Day, they must “continue without adjournment until all available ballots that can be legally counted have been tabulated,” except for provisional ballots and military votes. It also says “immediately once all voters in a county have completed voting,” the counties must publish their initial results, and they must provide updates at least every three hours.
The effect of the changes is that election staff will be working throughout the night. Seaman said they’ve brought people in specifically to work overnight, so they won’t be relying on staff members who’ve already been going for hours. He said it has been a challenge to get people who are trained, rested and ready for that shift.
“That's always that balance: making sure that voters can get accurate and timely election results, and how do we balance timeliness with accuracy?” Seaman said. “In elections, we’ll always prioritize accuracy – but what that means is that sometimes we're forced into creative solutions like this.”
Eric Semerad, the Gallatin County clerk and recorder-surveyor, says his office received a Help America Vote Act grant through the Montana Secretary of State’s Office, which allowed them to hire additional people to work the “graveyard shift.”
“So those processes hopefully will continue at a good rate throughout the night, so that we can really hit it hard and maybe get done by noon on Wednesday instead of 9:00 Wednesday night,” he said.
Both Seaman and Semerad said the public shouldn’t expect to see results from their counties immediately when the polls close at 8 p.m. Tuesday. Missoula and Gallatin Counties are both expecting a lot of voters coming in for same-day registration. They won’t put out their first results as long as anyone’s waiting in line.
“We want to encourage every voter to vote; we want to make sure that voters aren't influenced,” said Seaman. “In the primary there was no line, so it went really quickly for us. This is a federal presidential general election, and we expect to be serving voters past 8 p.m.”
“Some counties may be very quick and some counties may be very late,” he added. “That's not an issue relating to how that election went. It's just how long that line is.”
“We’re seeing longer lines this election than we've ever seen before, leading up to the election, and so I'm thinking that maybe on Election Day that those lines might be longer than we've ever seen,” Semerad said. “Typically, we have about a 3-to-4 hour line, and it might be up to six hours. If that's the case, we might be into Wednesday morning before we're releasing results.”
Late voter registration will be available until noon on Monday. It will then reopen on Election Day from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Contact your county election administrator for more information on where you can go if you still need to register.
Seaman said, in Missoula County, they’ve already seen more than 40,000 voters return absentee ballots. He said the number of people who vote at the polling place on Election Day could be a fraction of that – perhaps around 4,000 – though he expects thousands more will drop off absentee ballots on the last day.
Election officials say it’s now likely too late to mail an absentee ballot back, since it has to arrive before 8 p.m. on Election Day to count. While you can turn it in directly through Tuesday night, Seaman said it may be better to turn it in on Monday, so they can inform you if there’s an issue with verifying your signature.
