After hearing Sandra Merchant’s lame presentation last Friday, you probably thought things could not possibly get worse in the County Elections Office. Sorry to burst your bubble, but today things did get worse.
If you visited or called the Elections Office today, Jan Wenaas may have greeted you with a friendly smile and twinkle in her eye. She’s happy to have infiltrated the Elections Office camp, working behind the scenes as a self-proclaimed volunteer for Sandra Merchant. So, why is that a problem?
First, Wenaas is the face of Cascade County’s far-right “Election Integrity” committee, those pesky election deniers who believe the 2020 election was stolen, despite nearly 60 lawsuits whose outcomes proved otherwise. Yes, Wenaas believes The Big Lie; the same lie that MyPillow CEO, Mike Lindell, has been spouting and several Montana legislators have bought into – Steve and Lola Galloway, and Steve Gist to name a few.
In fact, Wenaas was instrumental arranging the bogus dog-and-pony show last year bringing State Senator Theresa Manzella of Ravalli County and her entourage of election deniers to Great Falls, including some dude from Colorado who claims he witnessed first-hand election malfeasance in his state. Their presentation contended vote count machines results are intercepted by Venezuelans, and the election outcomes changed at the blink of an eye. Wait, what??
Finally, Wenaas signed onto a petition sent to then County Commissioners Briggs, Larson and Ryan calling for them to immediately do among other things, the following:
Ban mail-in ballots except for overseas military, disabled or other qualified persons
Ballot turn in on election day only, with one day counting
Clean voter roles by requiring all qualified county residents to re-register
OMG, why is a woman who clearly does not believe in the state’s voting process sitting in front of a county computer at a desk in the Elections Office? So what that she’s a volunteer. She has access to the county phones. Does she also have access to voter registrations? Is she going to be handling ballots – those horrible mail ballots she believes the county should discontinue? Why is a volunteer working in the sacred space of the Elections Office, anyway?
Shocked yet? If so, tell your county commissioners:
Don’t waste your time contacting Commissioner Rae Grulkowski, newly dubbed by many county citizens as Sandra Merchant’s handler. Probably not worth your time to question the Elections Office self-proclaimed protector. And what’s up with that?
Maybe let Eric Bryson, Executive Director of the Montana Association of Counties, know you are concerned at: ebryson@mtcounties.org Next thing you know, Merchant will be telling us the vote counting machines don’t work, and everything needs to be hand counted. Stranger things have happened, or shall we say, are happening.
This flyer was distributed when Wenaas brought Manzella and the election denier crowd to Great Falls. Wenaas was one of the signers on this utterly insane petition circulated last year.
Ranked-choice voting (RCV), also known as instant-runoff voting, is a nonpartisan voting system that allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference rather than selecting a single candidate. In a ranked-choice voting system, voters mark their ballot by ranking the candidates in order of preference, such as first choice, second choice, third choice, and so on.
In the first round of vote counting, only the first-choice votes are counted. If one candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, that candidate wins the election. However, if no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes, the candidate with the fewest first-choice votes is eliminated, and then the second-choice votes on those ballots are counted instead. This process is repeated until one candidate receives a majority of the votes.
In our current plurality system, a candidate could win with a mere 33% of the vote. This leaves nearly 70% of voters not choosing the winner, sometimes feeling unrepresented, and caught in a game of splitting and wasting their vote. The purpose of RCV is to ensure that the winning candidate has broad support among voters. By allowing voters to rank candidates, RCV can reduce the impact of candidates splitting the vote, promote positive campaigning, and it has been shown to reduce the amount of wasted votes by three times.
A noisy minority, who don’t trust the intelligence of voters, testified at the hearing for HB 598 that RCV is complicated and claimed that voters are unhappy with RCV. However, a vast majority of those surveyed have found it very easy to use and want to use it again–between 75% and 94% (depending on the location surveyed).
RCV is used in several countries around the world, including Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand. In the United States, several cities have adopted RCV for local elections, including San Francisco, Oakland, Austin, New York City, Minneapolis and twenty-three cities in Utah. Some states have also adopted RCV for statewide elections, including Maine and Alaska, and seven states use RCV for military and overseas voting.
However, in Montana, even though no jurisdiction uses RCV (and some would argue that our constitution does not currently allow it to be used), HB 598 seeks to preemptively ban RCV from being used or even considered in Montana.
When HB 598 reached the floor, State Administration Committee member, Rep. Paul Green, changed his vote. When he realized that this ban would expressly limit local communities from choosing RCV for their local elections, he went from supporting the ban to opposing the ban. Had he considered this before, this bill would have died in committee. Despite this important consideration, the ban passed the House on March 3rd, with fourteen Republicans and all Democrats opposing the ban. You will be happy to know that Great Falls representatives George Nikolakakos (HD26) and Scott Kerns (HD23) were among those opposing this ban.
Eric Buhler is the Executive Director of RCV Montana, a grassroots nonpartisan nonprofit that seeks to educate Montana about alternative voting methods such as Ranked-choice Voting.
Last week, I did something that could become a crime in Montana – I raised my hand, rolled up my sleeve and donated lifesaving blood to help a patient in need.
Introduced by Rep. Greg Kmetz, R-Miles City, House Bill 645 would criminalize both blood and organ donation in Montana by anyone who has received a COVID-19 vaccine. It would also make it a crime to receive blood or an organ from a person vaccinated for COVID.
Simply put, this bill would have a devastating impact on our blood supply, our hospitals and patient care across the state. Experts estimate that if it passes, this measure would reduce Montana’s blood supply by 80 percent and have life-and-death consequences for so many who depend on these products being available on hospital shelves. Every two seconds, someone in this country needs lifesaving blood, whether it be a cancer patient, an expecting mom, an accident victim or someone undergoing surgery. Politics shouldn’t get in the way.
Blood can’t be manufactured – the only way to meet patient demand is through the generosity of blood donors. Encouraging people to put a needle in their arm and help someone they don’t know is difficult enough without criminalizing this altruistic act. Blood banks already struggle to meet current needs, and HB645 would have very real and very dire consequences for all of us and our loved ones.
Please let the House Human Services committee know you oppose HB645 by visiting https://leg.mt.gov/web-messaging/ and sending a quick and clear message.
I’ve never done drag—unless you count the floor-length robe and colorful stole I wear every Sunday when I preach. Sometimes I think it could be fun (I’ve even got my drag name picked out: “Pauline Epistle”), but I know it is far more work than I am prepared to commit to. It’s also, apparently, extremely dangerous.
In Montana, as in over a dozen states, legislation is moving forward to ban or severely restrict drag performances. These bills mischaracterize drag as inherently sexual in nature, “appealing to prurient interest.” That’s the language of Representative Mitchell’s HB359, which passed its second reading in the Montana House this week.
I recently got a chance to chat with my senator, who is one of the bill’s co-sponsors, about why he chose to attach his name to it. He gave the usual talking points, saying that the intention was to protect children from “sexualization.” It’s the same impulse that’s behind the recent surge book-banning and educator-muzzling rhetoric and policy. Save the children; protect their innocence from the perversions of our culture.
When I asked my senator if he had ever attended a drag show, he told me that he had not, which I imagine is true of most of the people backing the bill. (Although it’s always possible one of them might have had a past life as a drag performer in South America, I suppose.)
If they had, they might realize that nine times out of ten, particularly in the case of all-ages shows, drag performers have more in common with clowns and ballerinas than with actual adult entertainment performers, which HB359 tries to paint them as.
But, of course, this has never been about protecting children’s innocence. The same people concerned about the psychological damage a child might experience witnessing a man in a colorful dress read a storybook about being kind to people have no problem telling the same child that unless they pledge their eternal servitude to an invisible being who watches their every moment and knows their every thought, they will be tortured for all eternity—out of love.
The real reason they want to ban drag performances from the public sphere is because drag, emblematic of queerness itself, is a threat to entrenched systems of power.
In a recent legislative committee for Montana SB234, discussion about how we define obscenity led to the point being made that the Bible itself could easily fit the category of obscene literature.
Ezekiel contains language more explicit than even the bawdiest drag show I’ve ever seen, and it does so for the purpose of prophetic critique. The prophet uses a graphic analogy of adultery to denounce Israel and Judah for their dalliance with Assyrian and Babylonian empires, respectively. (In a similar manner, today’s prophets have rightly pointed out that much of the American church is ‘in bed’ with White Nationalism).
Likewise Isaiah walked around naked for three years, and Jeremiah paraded around with a pair of dirty underwear, disrupting norms and provoking shock and disgust.
The Hebrew prophets were the original performance artists.
The intersection of artistic expression and social critique terrifies those with vested interests in maintaining authoritarian control. As Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann says in The Prophetic Imagination: “every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”
Drag is dangerous for that very reason. It points out the farce of rigid black-and-white—or rather, pink-and-blue—thinking and imagines a rainbow of possibility for God’s beloveds. We really are all born naked, and the rest—as Mama Ru says—is drag.
We are not so far off from the 1960s, when trans people and drag artists could be arrested just for existing in public, experiencing grotesque violence at the hands of the state. The violence is still happening, emboldened by the increase in hateful legislation and political rhetoric.
It was drag queens and trans people leading the charge in those days, sparking a revolution that would transform the country and make it safe for people like me to be fully myself. Now it is up to the rest of us to stand with them, speak out against the fear and hate, and celebrate the joy and the beauty that queer people bring to our world.
I have little reason to believe those trying to legislate queer and trans people out of existence will have a change of heart and relent from their “slate of hate.” But that just means my calling to speak out on behalf of the marginalized, to imagine a world where everyone has what they need, is as clear as it has ever been.
And if I need a refresher course in the prophetic vocation, I’ll find a big, scary Drag Queen and let her spill the tea.
Rev. Stephen Underwood is an ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), serving a congregation in Great Falls, MT. The above opinions are exclusively his own.
Image retrieved from Glacier Queer Alliance. Follow their work here: https://www.facebook.com/GlacierQueerAlliance
The 2023 Legislative session is shaping up to be one of the ugliest in living memory. Bills attacking Indigenous Peoples, medical privacy, LGBTQ+ children, and the poor have dominated the session. And today, in yet another show of ignorance, Republicans tabled Senator Shane Morigeau’s bill to recognize Indigenous People’s Day.
Attempts to change the name of Columbus Day have been made at the state, local, and national level for years. So today, I’m sharing a piece from Rylee Mitchell, who wrote this piece as a Teen Columnist for the Great Falls Tribune in 2017. At the time, the requested change was for “Montana Heritage Day” to replace Columbus Day, a measure which also failed. Though this piece is nearly six years old now, Montana decided again today to continue honoring the rapist and genocidal murderer, Christopher Columbus.
This piece was written by Rylee Mitchel and published by the Great Falls Tribune on February 27, 2017.
“Columbus Day or Montana Heritage Day — the name of the holiday might not mean much to you, but to me, as a Native American, it matters quite a lot.
And it’s not just the name of the holiday but also how we teach Native American history in our schools. Learning about Columbus Day involves taking 10 minutes to go over the day he reaches America and how he sailed the ocean blue in 1492 in search of gold, spreading Christianity along the way. Then we jump to Thanksgiving and then to Lewis and Clark with nothing in between. No discussions about boarding schools, wars or mass killings. Native American history gets left in the past.
Let’s not forget that Columbus paved the way for the wicked and cruel murder and rape of the indigenous people.
We are people who don’t deserve to live in the Europeans’ shadow. We deserve to have our stories told in the history books just like everyone else.
By not properly educating people about Native American history, it makes them much less likely to relate to us and understand us. They think we aren’t like everyone else.
But why?
Because of the color of our skin? Because we should be on a reservation?
Ignorance leads to name calling like redskin, Pocahontas and war heads. We aren’t depicted as real people in pictures, just as fictional characters.
“All that Native Americans gave us was land and diseases.”
“Native Americans killed us, like the holocaust.”
“God gave the Indians Europeans to help them.”
I heard all these comments and more when we talked about Native Americans in class last year.
Native Americans still deal with the mass killings of the past. The times when the men went to get food and came back to find all the women and children killed and the camp burned. We deal with the history of boarding school rapes and abuse and the sterilizing of Native American women.
Our tribal members still must cope with all these things, and the drinking that can come with it. We are still getting hurt, stereotyped and treated like we aren’t human. We are lucky we are still here.
Changing the name of this holiday would give a voice to Native Americans and represent a step forward to understanding our culture. We deserve for our history and stories to be told in schools. Education leads to more understanding and fewer labels and stereotypes.
We are human. We deserve to have our story told.”
Rylee Mitchell is an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Montana. Rylee is from Great Falls, Montana. Rylee is currently studying Civil Engineering at Montana Tech in Butte, Montana.
