Posted on 04/20/2022 8:38:47 AM PDT by lasereye
Montana’s 2020 Election Irregularities Are Still Unaddressed Despite Recounts Gone Wrong, Erased Records, And Suddenly Surfacing Ballots
If we are going to avoid the type of debate that we saw after the November 3, 2020 election and restore confidence, then transparency is important. Take one of the least obvious places where people have concerns about the election — Montana.
Donald Trump won the state in 2020 by 16.4 percent. But there is an election transparency problem in Missoula County, Montana’s second-most populous county.
If errors can occur in even relatively uncontested parts of the country, we should be broadly concerned. What went wrong? Well, it all got worse after Covid-19 made mail-in voting mainstream.
Last January 4, a recount of the 2020 election in Missoula made national news when it found 4,592 fewer envelopes than the County Election Office’s tally of 72,491 votes. That is a 6.33 percent difference in votes counted. The county’s election was entirely mail-in, and envelopes were crucial for checking dates and signatures.
During that recount, the Missoula County election board provided 31 boxes of envelopes to be counted. On March 28, in a count commissioned by the Missoula County Republicans, the count resulted in only 71 fewer envelopes than votes.
Why the difference? For the March 28 count, the election board provided 33 boxes — two more than were provided in the first count (affidavits available here, here, and here).
With a total of 67,899 envelopes in the January 4 recount, having them in 31 boxes would imply an average of 2,200 envelopes per box. Throw in two missing boxes, and you come remarkably close to the original difference of 4,592 envelopes and the remaining difference of 71 envelopes.
So, there are two options, and neither is good. First, perhaps the county originally misplaced two boxes of envelopes. “It could mean that the Election Office is merely incompetent and lost track of two boxes,” said state Rep. Brad Tschida, R-Helena, in a statement on Monday. Tschida organized the January 4 recount.
The second option is that the two boxes of envelopes magically materialized. Tschida was less diplomatic about this: “The other alternative is that in the 15 months since January 4, 2021, two extra boxes of counterfeit envelopes were generated deliberately by wrongdoers.”
It is crucial to watch the video that the county election office made of the envelope-opening on election night, as one could simply count envelopes as they open. Indeed, that’s precisely why these types of videos are made. But there is a big problem. The county erased the video.
Missoula County regulations call for all video records to be preserved for at least 60 days. Importantly, federal law requires that “all records and papers… relating to any… act requisite to voting in such election [for federal office]” be kept for 22 months.
Obviously, the November 3, 2020 election had federal elections from the U.S. House of Representatives to the presidency. But the Montana Election Integrity Project specifically asked County Election Administrator Bradley Seaman on December 22, 2020 to preserve the videos, only 42 days after the election, well within both time periods. Now they’re allegedly gone.
Without the video, there is no way to determine how many envelopes were opened on November 3, 2020. The erasure of the video doesn’t instill confidence.
In April of last year, after the original count by the Integrity Project, Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen promised her office would create new statewide requirements. Specifically, she vowed to “protect the integrity of elections by enhancing election transparency through video requirements and retention.” But a year has now passed and additional elections have gone by. Jacobsen’s office has issued no related requirements or further statements.
The Integrity Project had found other problems not examined on March 28. When testing a smaller, random subsample of 15,455 mail-in envelopes, the project found that 55 lacked postmark dates and 53 never had their signatures checked. That’s a total of 0.7 percent of all ballots in the sample. Dozens of ballots also appeared to have duplicate signatures from nursing homes.
The more recent recount was performed entirely by the county. As Tschida notes, “The Election Office required citizen observers to sit at least six feet away — too far to see the signatures or dates on the affirmation envelopes.”
In addition, during the January 2021 recount, the Missoula County Election Office refused to allow any pictures and claimed Covid restrictions made it impossible for those doing the recount to share envelopes — it thus wasn’t possible to accurately document the duplicate signatures.
If Americans don’t trust the election results, they will be discouraged from voting in the future. Montana is hardly on anyone’s radar for vote fraud. But the concern is that if these problems can happen in Montana, they can happen anywhere.
Missoula - college town - ‘nuff said.
Truethevote has found a fairly consistent 7% of mail in votes were done illegally.
This Montana county had 100% mail in votes. It is consistent with what Truethevote has documented.
The only upside from the shenanigans are that the left blew it all to get rid of Trump. They went too far and its too difficult to hide.
As a result, it will be far harder for them to repeat this in the contested states. While the story receives little publicity in the MSM (they simply dismiss it without debate) there has been some significant change in legislatures to prevent such activity AND there are far more people scrutinizing elections now at the state and local level - especially in the usual suspect counties.
Look no further than Virginia - a state we were told was reliably blue yet they had a Republican sweep when over 90% of the poll watcher positions were filled.
In fact, a good case can be made that if the same level of scrutiny had been applied to the recent NJ election the repubicrat would have won. This has not been lost on the NJ Republican party and MAGA crowd who are more involved than ever going into the mid-term election.
Florida was supposedly a 50/50 tossup state and as if you did not believe DeSantis was awesome enough one of the first things he did was tell the election supervisors in Dade and Palm Beach (think that is right) to resign or the investigations would begin immediately. They did. Look at the numbers in the last election vs prior elections on a generic D vs R basis. Florida does not look like a toss-up any more and that is partly because those two officials were removed in two counties that continually found more votes.
There are many problems with elections but there are also reasons for some optimism moving forward that actions are being taken to clean it up.
Big Jon Tester-votes for every abomination Shumer puts forward. What a disgrace for the Big Sky State!
The fraud wasn’t about Trump. MT was not competitive at the President level. The Senate race was.
If you insist on a secret ballot, you go to the polls and vote in person where your ID is verified by poll workers before you are given a ballot to cast.
This whole signature on an envelop, then separate the ballot from that envelop means that there is never a way to challenge a mail-in ballot.
bttt
Vote every one of them out who must face a primary in 22 and then again in 24. That's how we fix it.
Bradley Seaman is a Democrat-appointed progressive. Any wonder that this is the one place in MT with notable issues wrt voting? I wonder if it would be a Dem stronghold without the cheating. I wonder if anywhere would be.
Without the cheating, President Trump would be in the White House with a Republican Senate and a Republican House.
“If errors can occur in even relatively uncontested parts of the country, we should be broadly concerned.”
Hmmm, “errors”, eh?
If there are discrepancies on my tax returns for years and years, and those discrepancies always benefit me and never result in me paying more taxes, then nobody is going to believe they were “errors”.
So I don’t believe that these irregularities that have been happening for decades which always benefit the Democrats are “errors” either.
What happened in Virginia was a triumph for citizen involvement. Hopefully in 2022 and 2024 we will repeat the effort. In certain polling places we need men who are confident in their ability to defend themselves and deliver damage if needed to stand up to the Rat goon squad. No women or nebbish lawyer or accountant types.
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