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The group backing a pair of constitutional initiatives that would rework Montana’s state and federal elections announced this week that it has collected enough signatures to have its proposals — a nonpartisan open primary measure and a general election runoff measure — placed on this fall’s ballot. County election administrators and the Montana Secretary of State’s Office still need to check the group’s count, but the news makes it likely that voters will face a pair of decisions in November with potentially seismic consequences for Montana’s balance of political power.
In a nutshell, the measures would do the following:
- CI-126, the open primary measure, would replace Montana’s current party-based June primaries with a system that places all candidates for a given office on a single ballot and advances the top four vote-getters to the November general election regardless of their party affiliation.
- CI-127, the general election runoff measure, would require some form of runoff whenever a general election contest doesn’t deliver any candidate an outright majority of the vote. It would be up to the state Legislature to decide what that looks like, with backers saying the likely options are either an Alaska-style ranked-choice voting system or Georgia-style runoffs where a subsequent vote is conducted with only the first round’s leading candidates.
Backers, organized as Montanans for Election Reform, contend that the two initiatives would tamp down political extremism by empowering independent-minded voters and making it harder for certain political interests (read: the hardline wing of the Montana GOP) to pressure middle-of-the-road candidates with the threat of challenges in party primaries.
Opponents, most vocally the state Republican Party, contend that reworking Montana elections would confuse voters, depress turnout and undermine faith in the integrity of an election system that is already subject to criticism in certain conservative circles.
Republican Party leaders have also attacked the backer group for accepting a significant amount of money, $4.2 million as of the most recent reporting period, from largely out-of-state donors. (One of the backer group’s six-figure donors, former Enron executive John Arnold and his wife, Laura, have also donated to Montana Free Press through a separate wing of their philanthropy. As is standard ethics practice in nonprofit journalism, our donors have no involvement in writing or editing pieces like the one you’re reading now.)
Looming over the debate is the experience of Montana’s northern neighbor, Alaska, where voters adopted top-four ranked-choice voting in 2020. In 2022, the system saw the typically Republican-leaning state elect Democrat Mary Peltola to its sole congressional seat after former Gov. Sarah Palin and another GOP candidate split the remainder of the vote.
A generally positive review of the Alaska experiment by R Street, a center-right national think tank, concluded that the new system also nearly doubled the number of legislative races that produced competitive general elections, with “competitive” defined as elections in which the winning candidate secured no more than 55% of the vote.
Even so, Peltola’s win, as well as the 2022 re-election of Alaska’ independent-minded Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, has helped fuel a national Republican backlash against ranked-choice voting. Many GOP-controlled state legislatures, Montana’s included, have since passed laws that ban the practice in their elections. (As constitutional initiatives, CI-126 and CI-127 would preempt the Montana law if approved by voters.)
One result of that pushback? While Montana is among several states where voters may have the chance to consider a switch to ranked-choice voting this year, the Alaska ballot, depending on the outcome of pending litigation, could include a measure to revert the state back to its old system.
READ MORE: Backers say they have signatures to qualify nonpartisan primary and majority vote initiatives for fall ballot.
—Eric Dietrich, Deputy Editor
The Welcome Wagon
Readers of yesterday’s edition of Capitolized, MTFP’s weekly politics newsletter, might have noticed a name that’s new to Montana Free Press, but long familiar to Montana readers. The byline belongs to Tom Lutey, who started work this week as MTFP’s politics and investigations reporter.
Followers of Montana news have had ample opportunity to get to know Tom’s work since he graduated from the University of Montana with a journalism degree in 1995. That launch led him to successive stints at the Hungry Horse News and Whitefish Pilot, the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Washington, and, since 2008, the Billings Gazette. Along the way, he’s covered state politics and a variety of adjacent beats from almost every angle imaginable, not least through the lenses of the state’s energy and agriculture economies.
Tom’s reporting, in Capitolized and all the other venues where we report Montana news, will anchor our coverage of elections, the state Capitol, and Montana’s federal delegation in Washington, D.C. He has a mandate to pursue impactful investigations wherever they may lead him. And he’ll contribute his experience and expertise to beats across MTFP’s growing newsroom.
We’re awfully pleased to have his help to move our mission — “to uncover the truth and bring to light essential news stories by studying arcane bureaucratic processes, seeking out dark corners of major institutions, digging deep into data and documents, and holding power accountable to the people” — forward.
Please reach out with your welcome, and your story tips, to tlutey@montanafreepress.org.
—Brad Tyer, Editor
Verbatim 💬
“It is sickening that the annual death toll of IVF embryos is not meticulously recorded despite extinguishing so many lives daily. If you believe that life begins at conception as I do, there is no difference between an abortion and the destruction of an IVF embryo.”
—U.S. Rep. Matt Rosendale, who represents Montana’s eastern congressional district, expressing his opposition in a Thursday statement to a Democratic bill that would have guaranteed access to in vitro fertilization nationally. The bill failed a procedural vote in the U.S. Senate in the face of Republican opposition.
Wildlife Watch 🐻
An 80-year-old Troy man was sentenced to two months in jail and fined $10,000 this week for killing a grizzly bear on his property in 2020 and disposing of the bear’s GPS collar in the Yaak River.
Othel Lee Pearson pleaded guilty in January to tampering with evidence, a felony, and failure to report taking a grizzly bear, a misdemeanor.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Donald Molloy of Missoula sentenced Pearson. In addition to two months of incarceration, Pearson will be placed on house arrest for four months, followed by three years of supervised release. Molloy also ordered Pearson to forfeit the .270 rifle and scope he used to shoot the sow.
In a Tuesday press release about the sentencing, U.S. Attorney Jesse Laslovich described Pearson’s conduct as “troubling,” particularly since it occurred in the Cabinet-Yaak Ecosystem, a federally designated grizzly bear recovery zone.
“Those of us who grew up in Montana know not just the dangers associated with grizzly bears, but also their protected status as a threatened species,” Laslovich said. “When, as here, one illegally kills a grizzly bear, and in an attempt to cover it up, cuts off the bear’s GPS collar, tosses it into the Yaak River, and butchers the carcass for disposal, a federal felony will be pursued.”
Pearson’s conviction is a rare outcome for a grizzly killing. An investigation by The Intercept published late last year found that of the 118 investigations into grizzly killings the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service completed between 2015 and 2022, just five resulted in criminal penalties under the Endangered Species Act.
—Amanda Eggert, Reporter
Following the Law ⚖️
Back in April, Republican Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen joined a four-state legal challenge against a pending expansion of federal civil rights protections that would prohibit harassment and discrimination in education settings on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation. Now a federal judge in Louisiana has temporarily halted the Title IX rule change, slated to go into effect Aug. 1, until the lawsuit concludes.
Republican state Superintendent Elsie Arntzen promptly issued a statement Friday celebrating the June 13 injunction. Arntzen, a vocal proponent of the self-styled parental rights movement, called the decision “a huge win against the woke infringement on the rights of our Montana girls” in a press release from the Office of Public Instruction. “In Montana, we have two sexes, male and female,” she also said.
Meanwhile, the Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ advocacy group, decried the order as “MAGA theatrics” and said it “prioritizes anti-LGBTQ+ hate over the safety and well-being of students.” The injunction blocking the new Title IX rule applies only in Montana, Louisiana, Mississippi and Idaho — the four states that filed the lawsuit.
—Alex Sakariassen, Reporter
The Gist 📌
For more than three decades, the nonprofit Carter Center founded by former President Jimmy Carter has forged an international reputation for monitoring the election process in struggling democracies across the globe, among them Kenya, Tunisia, Venezuela and Myanmar. With the rise of election misinformation in America the past few years, however, the organization has begun to turn that experience closer to home, assisting nonpartisan observation efforts in Georgia, Arizona and Michigan. Now Montana is being added to the list.
Combating misinformation also happens to be a driving interest for two prominent voices in Montana’s election integrity debate: former Commissioner of Political Practices Jeff Mangan and former Republican state lawmaker Geraldine Custer. In something of a peanut butter and jelly moment, the duo partnered with the Carter Center this year to launch the Montana Election Observation Initiative, which trained more than a dozen volunteers for a test run observing 19 of Missoula County’s 22 polling stations during the June 4 primary.
“We want to provide a process and a report and generate data that folks can trust and have faith in,” Mangan told MTFP this week.
The results of the trial, which included monitoring Missoula’s pre- and post-election procedures as well as activity at the polls, concluded the primary was “generally well-conducted.” Observers noted a few areas for improvement, among them a need for more consistency in the guidance election judges give local citizens regarding same-day voter registration. Missoula County Election Administrator Bradley Seaman said he welcomes such feedback, especially if it’s timely enough for his office to adjust its practices before the next election.
Mangan, Custer and the Carter Center plan to expand their observation efforts to polling stations in 15 counties during Montana’s Nov. 5 general election. Mangan estimates the undertaking will require between 100 and 200 volunteers, noting the initiative is striving to avoid competing with counties who themselves will be recruiting locals to serve as election judges. Custer, who has long served as the Rosebud County clerk and recorder, said the goal is to show voters that “pretty much across the board in Montana, we’re doing things to the best of our ability to make sure that everything is done just right.”
—Alex Sakariassen, Reporter
