By Jason Stuart
Ranger-Review Staff Writer
Ballots are pouring in and Dawson County election officials are ready to go for Tuesday’s 2016 General Election.
Of the nearly 2,700 absentee ballots the county mailed out, Clerk and Recorder Shirley Kreiman said Thursday that 1,986 of them have already been returned, representing two-thirds of the total mailed out. Kreiman said that’s not really an unusually high return rate, noting that Dawson County tends to have high voter participation when it comes to absentee ballots.
“I think we generally get more returned in a presidential election, but for the most part our county is pretty good about returning ballots,” Kreiman said.
None of those votes have been counted yet, as the county does not begin counting votes until all ballots are in following the close of the polls on election night.
For the remaining 676 voters who requested absentee ballots and have not yet turned them in, Kreiman stressed that they should bring them directly to the Dawson County Courthouse to drop off, not mail them. Ballots must be received by Election Day, not postmarked by it, and any that arrive at the courthouse after Tuesday are invalid. The polling places — the EPEC in Glendive and the Senior Center in Richey — will also have a box where those who have not yet returned their absentee ballots can drop them off.
The polls open at 7 a.m. in Glendive and at noon in Richey.
Kreiman and Elections Administrator LeAnne Cantrell also noted that new voter registrations are continuing to come in as the election draws near.
“I had probably three people come in yesterday that were new registrants,” Cantrell said Thursday.
Late registrants must visit the courthouse to register and must also cast their vote at the courthouse and may do so up through the close of the polls at 8 p.m. on Tuesday. However, elections staff will be unavailable to register new voters or hand out ballots Monday afternoon as they go through final testing and preparation.
A major part of that preparation happened Thursday morning, as Cantrell and Kreiman conducted their “public test” of one of the county’s 10 voting machines. Montana law requires counties to hold a public test of 10 percent of their voting machines prior to the election. They have already previously run all the machines through testing, but the law requires the public test for purposes of transparency.
To conduct the test, Kreiman and Cantrell made up 10 sample ballots, ran them through the machine, and then hand-checked the test ballots against the vote tallies from the machine. Everything matched up perfectly during the test.
Dawson County’s voting machines do more than just count votes. They also sort ballots by precincts and shoot ballots with write-ins on them into a separate bin, where they can be taken and election staff can check the voter’s write-ins against the list of those officially declared as write-in candidates.
As for write-in votes, Kreiman noted that writing in the name of someone who is not officially declared as a write-in candidate does not invalidate the rest of the ballot. That particular vote won’t be counted, but the rest of the ballot will be.
And if you mess up your ballot and accidentally vote for two candidates in the same race? No problem, Kreiman said, as the voting machines will catch “overvotes” and spit the ballot back out, at which point the voter has the choice of getting a new ballot or choosing to submit that one and not have the race they overvoted on counted.
For any voters who are concerned about voter fraud, Kreiman had a simple message – come see what the elections administrators do. A start would have been coming to the public test of the voting machine, she said. No members of the public turned up for the test. But anyone who is that concerned about voter fraud can also come watch the counters work on election night – if they’re willing to be locked up with them for the duration.
“They can come and witness the count-in process if they want to be sequestered with the electiown board,” Kreiman said.
And as far as any meddling with the vote by Russian hackers or some such, Kreiman said that’s simply an impossibility here in Dawson County.
“These machines aren’t hooked up to the internet,” she said.
Reach Jason Stuart at rrreporter@rangerreview.com.