On the Record delivers insights and opinions from Montana’s most influential newsmakers and experts in conversation with the reporters and editors of Montana Free Press.
With Election Day less than a month away, county officials across Montana are busy registering voters, answering questions, testing equipment and preparing to mail out hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots on Oct. 9.
Much of the work is coordinated by elections administrators, the public employees who are tasked with making voting easy, reliable and secure. And, as high-profile claims of election fraud are promoted at the highest levels of government, local election administrators are the ones left assuaging voter concerns and making sure the tabulators work.
We sat down with three election administrators — Dayna Causby of Yellowstone County, Crystal Roascio of Carbon County and Eric Semerad of Gallatin County — to ask how they handle the pressure and responsibility of their jobs, and how the work has changed in recent years.
Causby began her position in Yellowstone County about a year ago but has worked in elections since 2012, both in public roles and as a consultant, across jurisdictions around the country, including Cleveland County, North Carolina and Missoula in 2018.
Roascio has served as the election administrator in Carbon County for four years, where she’s lived for over a decade. She began working for the county in 2018.
Semerad has spent more than 36 years in the Gallatin County clerk and recorder’s office, where he’s worked as the election administrator for the past eight years.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mara Silvers: How would you describe what it’s like to be an election administrator in Montana right now? Especially literally today, about a month out from Election Day?
Semerad: This time of year historically has been, you know, absolutely crazy. Just preparing ballots to be mailed out and getting all our ballots printed and having it delivered to our office and stuff. We’re doing that differently this year. The ballots aren’t actually coming here — we’re taking our people to our vendor and doing the mailing stuff off-site. So it’s very quiet in the election office and kind of strange.
We just don’t have the space in our facility here at the courthouse to be doing that anymore. It just doesn’t support the number of voters that we have in Gallatin County. The courthouse was built in 1935 for a county in 1935 and it just hasn’t grown to fit the job.
Roascio: Here in Carbon County, we’re well ahead of schedule, which is nice. Our ballots have been stuffed for the last two and a half weeks now. So we’re ready to go. I’m finishing up my last reconciliation on them today [Friday, Oct. 2].
Silvers: And what does reconciliation mean?
Roascio: I’m going back through, counting, making sure that my leftover ballots that I have are correct compared to what I’m mailing out and everything matches up to what I have ordered. So far, everything is coming back correct.
Causby: In Yellowstone County, we are an 85% mail-out county. So 85% of our ballots go out on the 9th [of October]. They leave my possession in our office on Monday to go to our vendors. Like everyone else, we’re about two weeks ahead of schedule. All ballots have been prepared for the last two weeks. And we are just working through any updates, pulling any ballots that needed to have some kind of update done to them and reissuing those to be ready to be mailed out on the 9th.
We have a new location — sorry, Eric — and having everything on one footprint is so nice here at Metra[Park]. And so it’s a lot of building out communications with voters, social media campaigns, just an entire communications campaign around our move. On the outside of our [ballot] instructions, we have a big notice that says, ‘Hey, don’t forget, sign your ballot. That’s important. Put that birth year on there, because that’s also important. And we’ve moved, and here’s our new location.’”
Silvers: I know that there were, at the national level, so many last-minute conversations and court cases about the mail-in voting process. Did that change timelines for you at all?
Causby: I think everybody had those lawsuits on their mind, and there are a lot of people who were very concerned over what that looked like for them. I know that, North Carolina, their ballots are the first in the country to mail out — they mailed out September 4th. Once ballots hit the mail, it’s kind of hard to make any vast and sweeping changes. So once their ballots hit the mail, we were all pretty much set in stone on the fact that we were going to move forward with our procedures that we had currently laid out.
I’m sure everyone on this call talks a lot with their mail service. I talk with my mail person — I just sent her an email today at the post office — I talk with her almost daily, and she also was updating us on, ‘Hey, we have not heard anything. We know that rule came out. We’ve kind of been told it’s unofficially on pause.’ We definitely were all speaking with people with that knowledge throughout this process.
Silvers: How has the job of working in elections or being an election administrator changed over the time that you’ve been doing this?
Semerad: I can go way back on that one because I’ve been doing it for a really, really long time. And when I started in 1990, we didn’t have excuse-free absentee. You had to be out of the county on Election Day to use absentee voting in Montana. And so back then, we had a very small fraction of absentee voters, and everything was at the polls. I remember, in the early ’90s, we had like 49 polling places — that’s more than we have now when we have more than twice as many voters as we had back then.
And then the other piece that’s changed is that the technology is quite a bit different. When I started here, we had punch cards. And so we had hanging chads and all that kind of stuff. We still find chads in our voting equipment sometimes — we haven’t used that stuff in over 30 years.
Roascio: We went to centralized counting due to the fact that we are over 70% absentee voting. So everything is centralized now because it was just gonna be too much to put the tabulators in all of our polling locations when we only have, in most of our polling locations, maybe 60 voters, 70 voters, that go in there.
Silvers: Does that mean that you’re counting all in one place? Even if you still have in-person polling, all of the ballots are coming back?
Roascio: Yes. So everything comes back to our office, and the tabulation is done here. So they can vote at the polls, and they drop them off in the ballot box there. But at the end of the night, we have an official judge with a law enforcement officer go and pick up those boxes and bring them back here.
Causby: Those precinct-level tabulators have an end-of-life. And so, a lot of people around 2020 were ready for that upgrade to the next level of precinct-level tabulators. And, like Crystal and counties across Montana and across the country, right, they had to look at that and say, well okay, if we upgrade our precinct-level tabulators, in five years we’re gonna have to do it again. But is it cost-effective to say that that’s worth it for those when we could actually just process everything at our tabulation center with more expensive machines that have a longer lifespan? And I cannot describe how much quicker [centralized tabulators are]. It takes 40 seconds for a ballot to go through a precinct-level tabulation machine. I can do 50 ballots in 23 seconds in my big tabulators.
Semerad: They’re very high-speed.
Roascio: That’s why we’re like, no, it’s going to be more cost-efficient to bring it back to [centralized] tabulation. And it took a little bit for us to get the voters to understand that. We still had some that would rather see them all back out there.
Causby: The machines are obviously secure; they don’t touch the internet, but it’s the perception of it.
Since 2016, there’s been a very big push around tabulation, tabulation machines, how they work, are they connected to the internet, are they not connected to the internet? Can you hack them? And then the rhetoric around that has just expanded. I mean, I was in North Carolina in 2016. I never thought I would need a panic button in my office because somebody got so irate that I was concerned for the person working my front desk, right? I never once thought that I’d need that.
We, as election administrators, have definitely felt a bigger push against people feeling like they have the right to come to us and just be openly belligerent and hateful and, like, ugly about stuff. Before then, it really wasn’t as polarizing, or at least not to the same extent.
Silvers: How are all of you assessing whether your local electorate trusts you? And is there anything specific that your teams are trying to do to build that trust?
Semerad: One thing that I do is go out and talk to various organizations outside of the county. People ask me to come speak to them about elections, and so to be able to educate them about what’s going on. And then, you do have lots of posts that we put on social media that inform voters of what’s going on with elections. [We] try to keep a profile in the county where we’re visible, and that they know that we’re doing our job and taking care of the voters here.
Roascio: Here in Carbon County, we’ve had our issues. We do have a group that tries to make it sound like we aren’t trustable, but that has been kind of swept under the rug to where most of the county doesn’t have an issue anymore. All of our stuff is open to the public. I put there what time we’re going to go get the mail, what time we open our ballot box, so that way they know they can come and watch that. The time that we put our labels on our ballots, everything like that, everything is open to the public. So I just try to open it up as much as possible, invite people to everything, but the problem is we don’t get very many people who want to come in. They just want to complain.
Causby: We encourage our naysayers to join us. If you have a question, we are always looking for election judges. And if you are passionate, and obviously you are — you’re so passionate that you had to call my office — we encourage you to sign up for election judge training. We’d love to utilize you.
Semerad: One last thing about helping with the trust in the election is our public tests. Doing the public test of a tabulator is incredible because you can show them the actual ballots that are gonna go through the machine. This is the result you’re supposed to get. You can have them actually total those results themselves, in a precinct or multiple precincts, and then run them through the machines and, hey, the machine does the correct count. Every time.
Silvers: Why do each of you do this job?
Semerad: For me, it’s just public service. I’ve been a public servant for so long, and I love the work. I love working with the people. I love answering people’s questions. Being able to educate voters that come into the office about how we do things and all that — it brings me joy, and it’s my purpose in life. I’m going to be retiring probably in four more years. So, you know, this has been my entire life.
Roascio: Growing up, I was always told that this is one of the most important things that you can do, elections. So I’m here to protect the voices of Carbon County and the voices of Montana, and I’m going to continue to do that.
Causby: Like Eric, my mantra is service. Service to our community is most important. Our job is all about serving others, helping others to get to whatever it is that they want, whether they be a candidate, whether they be a voter. I have tried to leave elections a few times. It keeps sucking me back in.
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