MT: New Cascade County elections officer fields questions at heated meeting
GREAT FALLS — An estimated 150 people packed the Family Living Center on Friday for the Cascade County elections officer’s presentation on how the upcoming local elections were going to be conducted in a meeting that featured some heated exchanges and continued questions around cost.
Community members and department heads piled into the standing-room only space and more than 100 tuned via Zoom to seek answers about how new Clerk and Recorder Sandra Merchant would hold five upcoming local elections. The questions arose after Merchant sent emails to the school districts in March saying the planned mail-in ballot election would not be possible and requesting the Great Falls Public Library postpone its election to September.
Merchant said during the presentation Friday absentee ballots will be going out April 17 and a poll election will be conducted for the school board election on May 2, a break from the typical mail-in ballot election where ballots are sent to all registered voters in the county. She also confirmed the public schools mill levy election will take place on June 6.
But members of the public and at least one other elected official still had unanswered questions, and the Elections Office in Cascade County isn’t the only one in the state seeing issues. The clerk and recorder and election staff in Lincoln County all quit March 24 , as reported by KPAX and the Daily Inter Lake this week, leaving confusion for their upcoming school board election as well.
In Cascade County, one question that remains is the cost differential between holding a hybrid poll-election with absentee ballots vs. sending ballots to all registered voters. More than 80% of the county typically votes by mail.
https://www.newsfromthestates.com/article/new-cascade-county-elections-officer-fields-questions-heated-meeting
