Well, you probably already heard about the marathon County Commission meeting to take testimony about eliminating election administration from Clerk and Recorder, Sandra Merchant. For the record, the Commission decided the right thing to do was have elections handled by someone who knows what they are doing, a novel thought! We’ll be publishing more on that later.
This post focuses on one of the more bizarre claims made by a Merchant supporter. There were plenty of weird statements, but we think Representative Steven Galloway takes the cake. After waiting almost to the end of public comment, Galloway rose to impart his wisdom to the Commissioners. Saying he is concerned about the county’s ability to find qualified applicants to administer elections, Galloway continued, “You can’t find employees, because the population is decreasing – through people not having kids, having abortions, we’ve got folks that are retiring.” Check out the full article here: https://dailymontanan.com/2023/12/12/cascade-county-clerk-and-recorder-stripped-of-election-duties/
So, let’s look a little more closely at Galloway’s assertion. First, is the population of Montana really declining? Well, the answer to that one is “No.” Since 2010, Montana’s population grew 13.3%. Of course Cascade County is not seeing the same growth as Gallatin, Missoula and Flathead Counties. During the same period, Cascade County grew 4.1%. https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/our-changing-population/state/montana/
But the thing that really caught our attention was his assertion that abortion is a contributing cause to our labor shortage. In 2021, 1,728 abortions were performed in Montana. (FYI of those 73% were chemical). Montana’s population in 2021 was 1.104 million. Don’t rush for your calculator, that amounts to 00.0015%. Hardly a big enough number to cause an unemployment problem. But facts coming from Merchant’s supporters were in short supply during the meeting.
If Galloway really wants to do something about the labor market, he should get his head out of his right-wing play book and consider supporting reasonable immigration reform, rather than building a barbed wire fence around the country.
Mary Sheehy Moe: Foxes and doggies and frogs – Oh my!
I struggle to find the apt analogy: The dog that finally catches the bus? The frog that doesn’t notice the water is boiling? The fox in the henhouse?
All of the above swirl around the drain of what’s happening to the most fundamental of our democratic rights — the right to vote. The nationwide wave of efforts to discourage voting laps even at Montana’s shores. On the pretext of securing election integrity, Republicans continually advance bills making it harder for some populations to vote — Native Americans, college students, the homebound, people who can’t get off work or find a way into town on two different days to register and then to vote.
But now we’re seeing a new twist — relentless efforts to discredit those who run our elections and replace them with election deniers. In 2022, election deniers comprised 80% of the candidates running nationwide in secretary of state races. Half won their primaries. Only 8% ultimately won the seat. Thankfully, most voters don’t want a Fox-fed fox in their most precious henhouse.
Unfortunately, there’s more. Since late 2020, 161 chief local elections officials (40%) in 11 Western states, Montana included, left their positions. The average experience levels in those 161 offices plummeted from approximately eight years to about one. With the cybersecurity, technology and legal issues surrounding elections, experience matters. As the cross-partisan political reform group Issue One cautions, inexperienced elections officers are “more prone to making small mistakes based on lack of knowledge — mistakes that, however innocuous, may be interpreted by hyper-partisans as malicious acts.”
What those 161 offices have now isn’t a fox in the henhouse, but a dog who caught the bus. This inexperience feeds the very narrative election deniers were yipping between howled lies before the newbies were elected. You need look no farther than Great Falls, to see how alarmingly this dog don’t hunt. Since being elected clerk and recorder in 2022, the election denier there has fouled up election after election.
In May, flood and irrigation district elections were so riddled with errors that both districts have turned to the courts for resolution.
The school board election was even worse — contradictory ballot instructions, misfolded ballots hampering ballot-counting, some voters receiving two ballots, others getting none, voters who work unable to vote because the polling place opened late, signature verification hindered by the fact that ballots were separated from envelopes … in short, so many gaffes that the court appointed an election monitor to oversee the next election.
Enter June’s library levy election: miscommunication on election dates, instructions so erroneous they had to be reprinted three times, multiple ballots to the same voter; no ballots for some voters … same-new, same-new.
And in the municipal elections last week, the nightmare continued. In addition to the now-usual dysfunction, inadequate prior notice had voters reporting to the usual polling place (the fairgrounds), where they were directed to the elections office, a small space on a busy downtown street with parking at a premium. Already disgruntled, voters plugged meters and queued up to enter a room whose very décor screamed partiality.
An enlarged Corinthians quote and a big ceramic elephant dominated the counter space. The walls were filled with pithy, pick-a-fight quotations incongruously placed next to more charitable tokens. My favorite: A large wooden cross adjacent to an even larger picture of a longhorn emblazoned with the words, “Do No Harm. But Take No Bull.” Jesus would be so pleased.
These are relatively small-potatoes local elections with low voter turnout. But 2024 is just around the corner. What’s that, Kermit? Water too warm?
Find the original article here: https://helenair.com/opinion/column/mary-sheehy-moe-foxes-and-doggies-and-frogs-oh-my/article_cd5c55f6-83d9-11ee-a5d6-43e02c899978.html
On November 7 Cascade County voters struggled to vote in another confusing and poorly administered election. In the run up to the election, voters contacted a volunteer monitoring group, The Election Protection Committee, with a host of problems including some voters who did not receive their ballot in the mail and others who received numerous ballots in the mail. Surprisingly, some voters residing outside the city limits received ballots even though they were ineligible to vote in yesterday’s city election. Ironically, still others were denied a ballot because the Clerk and Recorder’s office could not decipher city boundary lines and erroneously did not believe they were city residents.
When election day arrived, voters discovered they could not obtain a ballot nor deposit their voted ballots at the fairgrounds. For decades, voters could obtain a ballot, replace a damaged or lost ballot or same-day register and vote at the fairgrounds for the municipal election – 108 people showed up yesterday to vote and were sent downtown to the Election Office. In addition, 180 voted ballots were not permitted to be deposited at the fairgrounds, instead voters were instructed to deposit their voted ballots at the Election Office. There, voters encountered difficulties finding parking and long lines because of the limited space. No one knows how many of the people who started their voting journey at the fairgrounds simply gave up and did not vote because of time constraints and inconvenience.
It’s easy to say, “Well, election problems didn’t really matter because of the wide margins between the winning and losing candidates.” Only 73 votes separated Shannon Wilson and Eric Hinebauch in their race for city commission. Sandra Merchant’s foul ups could account for that difference. Just like the school board trustee election last spring, none of these candidates are likely to contest this election (even if they think there were significant errors) because of the potential cost to re-run an election.
That’s all well and good, but the next elections Merchant will oversee include all of the state-wide offices and a US Senate and Congressional Races. These campaigns will have the resources to challenge any problems they see. The truth is Sandra Merchant’s incompetence could determine the control of the US Senate in the next general election. And that is a scary thought.
The Blog Formerly Known as E-City Beat Should Change its Name to E-City Whiners
For years the blog formerly known as E-City Beat pushed right-wing propaganda with a healthy dose of personal attacks on anyone they didn’t agree with. But, when WTF406.com began responding and pushing back, E-City Beat writers Phil Faccenda and his pal Rick Tryon began whining and complaining. And like the bullies they are, they have combined whining with a healthy dose of chest thumping.
The most recent example is their attack on the Election Protection Committee (EPC), which is a volunteer group formed because of concerns about our new Clerk and Recorder, Sandra Merchant. She is not only an election denier with a political agenda but is also incompetent at running elections. There are already two lawsuits filed against the county because of errors she made. In addition, a judge ordered the county to provide a monitor to oversee the library mill levy election, and Great Falls Public Schools has requested the County Commission hire a professional election administrator and take the election duties out of the Clerk and Recorder’s office.
None of that concerns Faccenda and Tryon. The reason, as near as we can tell, is that they simply don’t like the people involved in The EPC. They ignore the fact that former Clerk and Recorder Rina Moore and her staff were constantly harassed by the election denier crowd prior to the election. They ignore the fact that virtually all of the staff in the office have been replaced by Merchant’s political cronies (including Randy Pinocci’s wife and daughter). Their recent article on the Election Protection Committee is full of misinformation, slurs and personal insults. Here’s an example from Faccenda’s latest article: “EPC is simply a group of self-appointed vigilantes who view politics as a blood sport where lying, cheating, and stealing are parts of their modus operandi.” Wow! Faccenda is welcome to his opinion and his vitriol, but he apparently doesn’t see the irony in his complaints about people expressing opinions he doesn’t like.
If this was just a one time thing, we wouldn’t bother to write this post. But Faccenda and Tryon have also attacked WTF406.com repeatedly. Mostly because of their long standing vendetta against one of the writers for WTF406, Jasmine Taylor. Faccenda writes in his recent article, “The Chairperson of EPC is the infamous Jasmine Taylor, who is well known for perpetrating dirty tricks against people and organizations that don’t reflect her wacko leftist views.”
We provide you with this link to Jasmine’s blog post challenging Faccenda’s and Tryon’s attack on a school board candidate back in May of 2022. ”After E-City Beat’s bizarre, ill-researched, and oddly sexualized attack on a school board candidate, I’m sitting here considering when (if ever) it is appropriate to discuss a political candidate’s penis. Before last week, I’d have easily said, ‘Never.’ This couldn’t possibly be relevant to a local election.” Yet, after E-city Beat clearly spent significant time staring the candidate’s well, package, it seems the conversation is at hand.” https://wtf406.com/2022/05/the-staggering-hypocrisy-of-e-city-beat/
Faccenda and Tryon are not used to getting challenged, which WTF406 has done repeatedly and consistently. So now they are whining about their free speech rights. No one, including WTF406, has challenged their right to spew Tucker Carlson’s talking points and other crap in their blog. Ironically, the Elections Protection Committee and WTF406 are simply exercising their right to free speech. But Faccenda and Tryon are so busy whining they can’t see their own hypocrisy.
