The votes have been cast and the races called in Montana’s 2024 general election. But for county workers, the election process itself is still not over, and vote counts won’t be considered truly official for several more weeks, until after they complete a variety of tasks intended to finalize counts and verify the accuracy of the results.That work is already well underway in many county election offices across the state, with trained election workers and staff preparing thousands of provisional ballots for verification and counting next week. Ballots are classified as provisional for a variety of reasons. Perhaps a voter turns up at the polls having already received an absentee ballot by mail, or they’ve moved to another county since the last election without updating their registration status. Prior to counting such ballots, election workers must confirm the voters who cast them are eligible to vote and haven’t submitted another ballot elsewhere. “We have to research each [provisional] ballot and determine if it can be counted or not,” Yellowstone County Elections Administrator Ginger Aldrich told Montana Free Press this week.Aldrich said Yellowstone County saw a high volume of provisional ballots cast this election, many by voters whose polling places changed due to redistricting and, despite county efforts to alert them about such changes, showed up in the wrong locations on Election Day. County offices can’t legally start their provisional ballots counts until 3 p.m. on the sixth day after the election, but since Monday is a federal holiday this year — Veterans Day — counties won’t be conducting their counts until next Tuesday.From there, counties will move on to their post-election audits. That phase begins next Tuesday when the state Board of Canvassers literally rolls dice to randomly select what races county election offices will be required to double check in a legally mandated hand-count of their local ballots. Changes to this phase implemented by the Legislature in 2023 have effectively doubled the size of the county audits, requiring them to count the votes in two federal races, two statewide races, two legislative races and two statewide ballot issues in 10% of the county’s precincts. The counts will be compared to the results produced by electronic tabulating machines on Election Day. If any notable discrepancies arise, the audit results will be incorporated into the official count instead of the tabulator results and the machine associated with the issue will be removed from service until it’s been examined and tested by an expert from tabulator manufacturer ES&S.The post-election audit has in the past largely served to verify the accuracy of electronic tabulators, with counties that conduct their Election Day ballot counts by hand exempted from the process. However, the new law requires that all Montana counties conduct post-election audits. It also grants county commissions the option of including a county-level race in the audit — an option election administrators in Missoula, Yellowstone and Lewis & Clark counties said their boards passed on this year.Once the post-election audits are complete, counties will move to the final local phase of the process: the county canvass. Lewis & Clark County Election Supervisor Connor Fitzpatrick described this stage as “presenting the story of the election itself.” Election officials will compile information on everything that happened — the number of absentee ballots mailed out, the number of ballots returned, the number of signatures on those ballots rejected, the total number of people who voted — and hand that information over to a board of county canvassers, typically the county commission, to review and certify.“They can see all the ballots, they can order a recount or they can vote to accept the election results,” Fitzpatrick said of county canvassers. “The election itself isn’t accepted or denied by the election administrator, merely conducted. So this is another check in the system, and all these [meetings] are publicly available to attend.”Certification by county canvass boards will close the book on local races, making the results official. But for federal, statewide and legislative offices, there’s one final step: state certification. Here, county boards forward their determinations to the board of state canvassers, which in turn sends its report certifying the election to the secretary of state for a final declaration of the winners, typically in early December. Then and only then are the results of Montana’s latest election considered official. The post What’s next in Montana’s 2024 election process? appeared first on Montana Free Press.