Butte’s Election Recount Scheduled

Butte-Silver Bow election officials sorted ballots Monday in preparation for a full-blown recount of vote tallies to be conducted Tuesday.

A judge ordered the recount Friday because county election officials believe votes from about 1,000 ballots were inadvertently counted twice on primary election night June 4.

Linda Sajor-Joyce, Butte-Silver Bow’s election chief, said Monday she still thinks someone might have accidentally taken a stack of counted ballots on election night and run them through the voting machine again.

The ballots were unsealed Monday and election judges spent the day counting them by hand so they know precisely how many will be run through voting machines Tuesday. The machines will tally votes in all the races.

The new results could affect a few close races, including a four-way contest for state District Court judge where Ann Shea and Frank Joseph finished with the most votes and were to advance to the Nov. 5 general election. William Joyce finished only 63 votes behind Joseph on election night.

The apparent miscount has drawn scrutiny at the state level and it was on display at the annex Monday.

Austin James, chief legal counsel and director of elections for the Montana Secretary of State’s Office, was on hand to observe the recount preparations, as were two Republican state senators and one Democrat.

Republican Jason Ellsworth, president of the Montana Senate, announced Friday night he was appointing a select committee to investigate the incident and determine what changes to the law may be required to prevent similar situations in the future.

Two Republican members of the committee, senators Mike Cuffe of Eureka and Theresa Manzella of Hamilton, were observing the recount preparations early Monday afternoon, as was Democrat Sen. Edie McClafferty of Butte. Ellsworth also appointed Sen. Shelly Vance, R-Belgrade, and Sen. Ryan Lynch, D-Butte, to the committee.

Manzella was on the annex floor filming ballots and some of the preparation work, but the GOP lawmakers were only observing things and would not interfere with the recount process, Cuffe said. Cuffe spoke with Sajor-Joyce and she was very open and helpful in explaining the proceedings, he said.

The committee will ultimately want to know what happened and will likely explore that after the recount is done, Cuffe said.

“There is no proof at this point of anything scandalous or anything improper,” Cuffe told The Montana Standard. “There may have been a simple mistake that we find. There may be something else … but this is not the time to begin to try to go down that route.”

Manzella led a group of GOP lawmakers in asking for a select committee last session to investigate “election integrity.” They brought forward several bills but many election workers said the election process in Montana is secure.

There was “a lot of battling over election integrity for the past couple of sessions,” Cuffe said, and some measures passed by Republicans were thrown out by the Montana Supreme Court.

Butte-Silver Bow is still largely Democrat territory and Cuffe said “sometimes stuff like this (recount) could turn into a dog fight.” But he said Sajor-Joyce was “running a good show” Monday and he believes the committee is fair-minded.

Sajor-Joyce said she first noticed that voting numbers might be a little off during a post-election audit but said they were still acceptable.

“I knew I wanted to take a harder look at it but … it was difficult to make the time to take a harder look,” she told The Montana Standard on Friday. “There was just so much going on.”

Election officials in Butte-Silver Bow, as in all counties, were under the gun to verify signatures that supporters had gathered in hopes of getting three state constitutional initiatives on the November ballot, Sajor-Joyce said.

Disputes about whether signatures of inactive voters should be counted spilled into the courts, with the Montana Supreme Court deciding the issue in late July.

“We were certifying petitions and then we had to recertify petitions and we were trying to help counties that had too many petitions, so it was just one thing on top of another,” Sajor-Joyce said. “There were other things that were taking priority” over a “deep dive” into the election results.

A concerned citizen also noticed something off about the numbers, Sajor-Joyce said.

“I said, ‘Yeah, this is the same thing that I was seeing,’ and he kind of helped me get through that deeper dive,” she said.

Sajor-Joyce did not say Friday who the concerned citizen was and declined to name him Monday, telling The Standard she was uncertain about any legal implications of doing so.

The actual recount is to start at 9 a.m. Tuesday and Sajor-Joyce said she hopes final results are known by Tuesday afternoon.

The new numbers could also affect a close race for a District 5 seat on the Council of Commissioners. And even though J.P. Gallagher finished first by a comfortable margin in a four-way primary for chief executive, Bill Foley finished second with 404 more votes than Rayelynn Brandl. Foley advanced to the general election based on the prior results but that could conceivably change.

Gallagher visited the Civic Center on Monday and said he was proud of the work that’s already gone into the recount. He was asked about the legislative investigation.

“You know, people are going to look at this differently and question whether, you know, things were done correctly,” he said. “But I don’t think there was anything malicious or intentional that happened here. I think it was a mistake.”