Cascade County relieves clerk and recorder of election duties 

After nearly six hours of allegation-laden public comment from a packed Exhibition Hall at Great Falls’ ExpoPark, the Cascade County Board of Commissioners voted 2-1 Tuesday to relieve Clerk and Recorder Sandra Merchant of her election duties and hand those responsibilities over to an as-yet-unnamed appointee. As a result, Cascade County is now the seventh county in Montana to employ a non-elected, nonpartisan election overseer.

The resolution, supported by commissioners Joe Briggs and Jim Larson, comes near the end of Merchant’s first year in office during which voters, school board trustees and county officials have increasingly criticized her handling of local elections. Cascade County has faced legal action twice in relation to elections held in 2023. One lawsuit resulted in a judge appointing a third-party monitor to oversee a library levy election in Great Falls. The other lawsuit was filed by voters in two special water districts who requested their elections be redone due to alleged violations of election law on Merchant’s part. 

The county also missed a state-mandated deadline last month for completing its canvass of the November municipal elections in Great Falls, Cascade and Belt — a canvass Briggs, during Tuesday’s meeting, referred to as “very challenging.”

Ahead of Tuesday’s vote, Briggs acknowledged that appointing a new election administrator raises several unanswered questions, among them how quickly the county will be able to hire and train such a person and how that position will be funded. However, Briggs reiterated that he’s sought the change for more than a year and brought the resolution forward in recognition of the complexity and importance of the 2024 elections. He did not, he insisted, “do this lightly.”

“The problem exists now,” Briggs said, “and I truly believe it has to be fixed now.”

Commission Chair Rae Grulkowski, the dissenting vote on the resolution, countered that Briggs and Larson hadn’t made an effort to communicate their concerns about recent elections to Merchant prior to pushing for revocation of her election duties. She referred to Tuesday’s meeting as a “six-hour lynching” and suggested the resolution was indicative of a need for change not in Cascade County’s elections department but “at the commissioner’s office.”

“This is reactionary and not well thought out,” Grulkowski said. “It’s confusing and disrespectful, to the electors and Ms. Merchant, and ourselves and our staff.”

According to the Montana Association of Clerk and Recorders, six Montana counties currently employ election administrators who are not county clerks: Big Horn, Carbon, Lake, Lincoln, Missoula and Yellowstone.

Merchant had made her position on the resolution clear last week in a post to the county election department’s website accusing commissioners of “overthrowing” her 36-vote victory against 16-year Democratic incumbent Rina Moore. In a call with MTFP Friday, Merchant reiterated her stance, arguing that the 2022 race was a referendum on local election security. She claimed the majority of voters chose her explicitly to oust Moore from her role as the overseer of Cascade County’s elections, and it’s those people who are “losing their vote.”

“They didn’t even know who I was,” Merchant said. “They wanted the election administrator who was there out, so they voted for me.”

Cascade County Attorney Josh Racki told MTFP last week that Merchant’s post was “not unlawful.” But the post triggered swift backlash from fellow county officials and the public. Commissioner Briggs, in a call with MTFP Friday, characterized the post as an “inappropriate use” of a government website and urged its removal. Members of the Election Protection Committee, a citizen-led group that’s repeatedly called for the revocation of Merchant’s election duties, called her argument that commissioners were attempting to nullify votes from the 2022 clerk and recorder election “ridiculous,” and the post itself “unethical.”

“If passed, this resolution is changing the duties of the clerk and recorder’s office, which is clearly within the purview of the county commission,” the group wrote in a press release attributed to member Ken Toole. 

For more than five hours Tuesday, Cascade County staff and members of the public weighed in on the proposal with varying degrees of color and candor. Supporters questioned or openly criticized Merchant’s performance, leveling allegations of general incompetence and of specific administration errors in the 2023 elections. They argued that placing elections in the hands of an objective, non-elected administrator — as one commenter summed up, someone who “doesn’t have a dog in the fight” — was the best move to safeguard the fairness, accuracy and integrity of Cascade County’s elections.

“There was never going to be a good time to bring this resolution. You were always going to make someone unhappy,” said Jasmine Taylor, a member of the Election Protection Committee, which submitted a petition signed by 300 people supporting the resolution. “Why now? Because if these errors continue to occur next year in a federal election, you will not be worrying about a citizens’ action group monitoring you. You will be worrying about millions of dollars from federal candidates suing us into oblivion and making our county look foolish in front of the entire nation.”

Great Falls Schools Superintendent Tom Moore did not take a stance on the resolution. However, he said that school officials approached Merchant multiple times offering to assist with conducting the district’s election in May — an offer, he added, she “did not ever take us up on.” The district ended up spending roughly $17,000 on legal counsel to answer questions related to validating the results of that election, costs that Moore noted were paid for with taxpayer money.

“We have no interest and no intent to run those elections ourselves in a district this size,” Moore said. “We have elected elections officials in Cascade County that are paid by our taxpayers and expected to run those elections without controversy. And that’s all we’re asking for.”

The district’s board of trustees sent a letter to the commission in September requesting that it employ a non-elected election administrator in the future — though one trustee, Paige Turoski, informed the commission Tuesday that the letter was not approved unanimously. Turoski spoke against the resolution.

Many of the dozens who joined Turoski in that opposition echoed Merchant’s assertion that stripping her of her election duties would “nullify” the 2022 election, “disenfranchise” the voters who chose her to lead their elections and constitute little more than a “power grab” on the part of the commission. They sought to defend Merchant with claims that she’d been ridiculed, harassed and left without support from other county officials or seasoned election department staff, and in numerous cases invoked God and the U.S. Constitution to sway commissioners. Several further accused Briggs and Larson of attempting to establish a “dictatorship” by placing the appointment of an election administrator under their control.

“I served this country for 22 years, 20 of which were overseas, many in countries like Afghanistan that were under the direct oppression of government,” said Great Falls resident Jeremiah Scott. “You’re sitting under my flag of the United States of America, and you’re trying to take away our right to vote for the clerk and recorder and trying to remove someone who has been elected for this position. And I just want to say how dare you. Joe [Briggs] and Jim [Larson], I call for your resignation.”

State Sen. Daniel Emrich, R-Great Falls, argued that keeping elections in the hands of an elected official created more accountability as voters could choose not to re-elect a clerk they believe is not fulfilling those duties adequately. Fellow Great Falls Republican Rep. Steve Galloway defended Merchant as having faced considerable challenges and “adversity” in assuming her duties without assistance from those with experience in elections. Montana Republican Party Chair Don Kaltschmidt, a Flathead County resident, encouraged the commission to find an alternative that would retain Merchant’s duties while also ensuring the election process is “safe, secure and organized.”

Prior to public comment, the commission was informed that the Cascade County Attorney’s Office had reviewed Merchant’s administration of elections in 2023 and had “no reason to believe that Ms. Merchant has knowingly or purposely violated any Montana law” in such a way that would result in the invalidation of an election.

While Grulkowski used the final minutes leading up to Tuesday’s vote to chastise Larson and Briggs for a perceived failure to give Merchant a chance, Larson and Briggs employed that time to enter counter-arguments of their own. Larson, himself a military veteran, said he took “umbrage” at public commenters invoking the flag he too served under to suggest that his differing opinion was wrong. He added that feedback on the resolution appeared “about as close” as the 2022 clerk and recorder election itself. For his part, Briggs addressed the assertion by several commenters that he was a “dictator” executing a “power grab.”

“Please, just no one think that this is an easy deal,” Briggs said. “And I’m truly sorry if you think I am some sort of an evil overlord with this massive plan because you give me a great deal more credit than I deserve because that’s not who I am.”

Cascade County is not the only spot in Montana to encounter challenges during its recent municipal election. Officials in Flathead County announced earlier this month that they had petitioned a district court to annul the November election for city council seats in Kalispell and allow the county elections office to readminister the election at its own expense. According to Clerk and Recorder Debbie Pierson, the request was due to a clerical error wherein the office failed to enter new city council boundaries into the state’s election software system. The county’s petition stated that 1,413 eligible voters were impacted and that as many as 176 had received the wrong ballot. As of Tuesday, Flathead County District Court had not issued an order in response to the petition.