It was an emergency just days before Election Day — a “damn emergency,” as Cascade County Elections Administrator Terry Thompson put it. Late in the afternoon on Friday, Nov. 1, Commissioner Joe Briggs put out a call for volunteers to shore up a worrying shortage of election staff. Three county staffers who were volunteering from the clerk and recorder’s office to help elections suddenly backed out. According to Thompson, they quit after Commissioner Rae Grulkowski commented that employees of the commissioners’ office shouldn’t work on elections. While the clerk and recorder was a different department, the words had an impact.“They all said, we are not going to help anymore,” Thompson said. “We have aspirations in the county, and we have concerns about what was said today that could hinder our opportunity if we help elections.”At that time, Thompson found herself in the center of a Venn diagram of election tumult that has dogged Cascade County for nearly two years. The political fallout from the removal of election duties from Clerk and Recorder Sandra Merchant collided with the change in election management under Thompson, a recently appointed administrator with a department structure new to the county on the eve of a high-profile presidential election beset with election fraud theories.And this was all before the Election Day lines at the Montana ExpoPark that amplified confusion and caused people to weigh the time spent in line against the ability to vote.“It appeared that they didn’t have enough personnel resources,” said Jeff Mangan, a former commissioner of political practices who was observing Election Day activity in Great Falls. “For what they had, they had folks work pretty much all day and into the night, and they addressed the challenges as best they could.”Personnel and politics converged in a way that added to the struggles many had with casting a vote in the 2024 general election in Cascade County, which joined other populous Montana counties with excruciating wait times for same-day registration. Having been under such scrutiny over the past two years, Cascade County resources didn’t appear to meet the demand.It wasn’t just poll voters and new registrants who struggled to cast a vote this fall. In the month before Election Day, absentee voters also grappled with overwhelmed systems.Mandy Tate, who lives at Malmstrom, thought she had all her ducks in a row to vote absentee. But when her ballot didn’t show up, she called a national USPS customer service line as well as the local distribution center. Tate knows how the system works, having been a mail carrier herself.“When I worked for the postal service, the ballots were super important,” she said.She never got an update from USPS, so she emailed Thompson, who advised patience for a few days. If the ballot didn’t show up, Tate could come to the elections office and request a new one. Four days later, with no ballot in her mailbox, Tate took her three kids of potty-training age and joined the line. In hindsight, she got off fairly easy, waiting for just about an hour on Oct. 25. But it still took a toll on others.“There was this poor old lady waiting with me,” Tate said. “By the time we got to the office, she was holding herself up by the door frame.”Her initial ballot never arrived. In Facebook groups with other military families at Malmstrom, she found a dozen stories of others who had the same problem: wondering how long to keep waiting for their ballots. The Associated Press documented reports of misdirected ballots across state lines, including out-of-state ballots landing in Cascade County.Election Day voters waiting in line dragged chairs along so they were able to sit while they waited at the Montana ExpoPark in Great Falls. Credit: Matt Hudson / MTFPBehind the scenes, Thompson was also frustrated with the USPS. Her office dropped more than 34,000 ballots off at the distribution center on Oct. 11, and weeks later she was hearing stories about a wife receiving a ballot while the husband had not or ballots that appeared late with a Pennsylvania postmark.“They did not deliver everything timely to the residents of this county,” Thompson said. “How could they have?”USPS reported handling more than 104,000 absentee ballots in Montana. The agency told media outlets, including Montana Free Press, that all ballots were delivered on time. After Tate allowed MTFP to share her address with USPS to check the delivery, USPS spokesperson Kim Frum stood by the agency statement.“After checking the data for this location I can tell you there have been no mail delays, and the postal service has delivered all ballots presented to us by the county,” Frum said in an email. She did not answer a request for more specific information for Tate’s address.Sen. Steve Daines also inquired with the USPS about ballot delivery lapses. The agency responded with a letter, shared with MTFP by Daines’ office, that included a press release sent to media outlets in late October. It said 98% of ballots got to voters within 2.2 days and that USPS was “unaware of any missent ballots.”Cases like this brought Tate and hundreds of others to the county annex building in downtown Great Falls, where the elections office is located. The line at the office grew by the day, eventually snaking through the hallway and outside the building. Thompson said they were mostly late registrations, address changes and people responding to national calls to vote early.Returned absentee ballots began arriving at the office at the rate of thousands per day. But during office hours, the line required all hands on deck. In the week leading up to Election Day, the lines at the county election office stretched out the door and around the building. Credit: Matt Hudson / MTFP“I finally had to say, you’ve got to let the phone ring,” Thompson said. “You’ve got to do the in-person registrations. And so our mailbox was getting full. And every couple of nights, I said, ‘Let’s clear the voicemails.’”It was a vicious cycle. Unanswered phone calls led more people to head to the county annex and stand in line, sometimes for hours to make a simple inquiry. Thompson’s team worked overnight shifts to scan envelopes as received so that voters could see them marked on ballot trackers as accepted. Volunteers sorted mail during the day to make nighttime scanning easier for county staff.But the workload outpaced the staff’s ability to keep up.“If you don’t have the bodies to pull it off, you can be prepared as possible for what you think you can do,” Thompson said.In Thompson’s estimation, the Election Day issues — the slow registration lines, the voter confusion, the unreturned phone calls — were the result of inadequate staffing. She took the reins of Cascade County elections in February and succeeded Merchant, who was relieved of election management during a public meeting last December that was moved to Exhibition Hall at the fairgrounds to accommodate large crowds and hours of public comment.Staffing challenges appeared soon after the June primary. In July, county commissioners approved interlocal agreements with Lewis and Clark, Glacier and Missoula counties for help verifying petition signatures in Cascade County. The request was “based on current staffing limitations.”In prior years, election work was the purview of the clerk and recorder, an elected official. Rina Fontana Moore, who led the office for 16 years before losing an election to Merchant in 2022, said she got people from various county offices to help with election work. They came from areas like solid waste, the print shop, accounting and assessors. The hours were billed inter-departmentally. Fontana Moore had one employee fully dedicated to election work in addition to the clerk and recorder office staff.“On Election Day, I used everyone on my staff, and that was for the most part 21 people,” she said. “If we had to backfill judges, I did that with my staff.”In Fontana Moore’s view, Thompson should have staffed up better — and earlier. Fontana Moore and Thompson met for three hours early in the year to share insights about running elections and what resources are needed. But as the election got closer, Fontana Moore didn’t engage with the elections office because she was a legislative candidate.“I think Terry was doing the best they could, and things happened,” she said.Thompson said there were structural challenges to staffing. As an appointed department head, she made her staffing request for the budget in fiscal year 2025, in which the November election fell. That approval didn’t come until August, though she inherited three office staffers hired by Merchant. She said she wasn’t able to requisition people from other departments the way Fontana Moore had.“She was the clerk and recorder. So she could pull from her team, from that office,” Thompson said. “I don’t have that ability as a department head.”Thompson was able to get volunteers from other county departments to assist late into the night, processing ballots after they’d finished their day jobs. She had three volunteers from Merchant’s clerk and recorder’s office until, less than a week before Election Day, Grulkowski made the comments that dissuaded them from helping.“I had three more county employees that were targeted or anticipated to be helping,” Thompson said. “And quite frankly… Commissioner Grulkowski at the special meeting when she said no county employee should be helping elections, killed it. Those three people backed out immediately.”Speaking at the end of an Oct. 30 special meeting on certifying mill levies, Grulkowski said she was concerned about county employees from the commissioner’s office helping with election duties.“I think the appearance is very poor right now,” Grulkowski said at that meeting. “I would recommend that this commission office abstain all our staff from the elections office except the election employees during these election times.”No official action was taken after the comments, but it was enough to spook those employees from volunteering. That sent Thompson into emergency mode and led Commissioner Briggs to send, on  Nov. 1, an email asking for help among the county ranks.The political pressures, which Thompson had been trying to ignore, became more and more acute as the election neared.“I got a text from one of [Merchant’s] supporters days before saying Sandra should be back in there and you should be working for Sandra,” Thompson said. “I just don’t need that crap.”In county commission meetings before and after the election, supporters of Merchant and Grulkowski have tied managerial challenges back to the decision to remove election administration from the clerk and recorder’s office. Grulkowski told MTFP that she thinks Merchant would have done a “fine job” running the 2024 general election.“Sandra had the experience of knowing what to expect,” Grulkowski said. “She didn’t have the support of the commissioners — that’s evident. But I would have supported her, and I would have supported the elections office, just as I would have started doing this year.”Criticism of Merchant’s management came shortly after the first elections she oversaw in 2023. A letter from Great Falls Public Schools said a lack of communication, missed deadlines, ballot envelope issues and added costs hampered the May trustee election. That prompted the Great Falls Public Library to ask a judge to appoint a special election monitor for its mill levy election in June 2023.And last month, a district judge threw out the results of the May 2023 Fort Shaw Irrigation District election, citing numerous mistakes in ballot preparation and voter participation under Merchant’s management. All of this intensified the attention on Thompson’s work as elections administrator.Speaking with MTFP, Merchant had little to say about the situation. She confirmed that three of her staff members were volunteering to help Thompson in the election office. She said she didn’t know what caused them to stop.“No, and I didn’t ask them,” Merchant said.Merchant was more forthcoming in a series of Rumble videos that supported Grulkowski’s reelection campaign. She maintains that she was unfairly maligned after the 2023 elections.“People were doing things to try to make it look like I was doing something wrong in the office, and that was not true,” she said in one video.Merchant and Grulkowski, as well as their supporters, point to the current challenges as evidence that county commissioners were flawed in the decision to appoint an election administrator. Events on Election Day boosted those perceptions.In response to Briggs’ call for help, 10 county employees raised their hands and went through some truncated training the weekend before Nov. 5. They couldn’t act as election judges, but they had various jobs before and on Election Day. Commissioner Jim Larson set up tables and chairs at Exhibition Hall. Public Works Director Les Payne ferried sandwiches to election workers at the ExpoPark and at polling places in Sun River and Fort Shaw.In addition, Thompson said the Montana Secretary of State’s office sent someone to help on Election Day — making the trip twice from Helena to Great Falls that night as wet snow covered central Montana.The Election Day county staff was still about half of what Fontana Moore said she had available. The deficit was felt most acutely at the same-day registration table, which relied on county staff. The line began growing almost immediately after polls opened. Staff had to open up the Pacific Steel and Recycling Arena to keep people out of the weather. Staff at the Montana ExpoPark opened up the arena space adjacent to Exhibition Hall to accommodate the same-day registration line that formed. Credit: Matt Hudson / MTFPBy late morning, reported wait times were two and a half hours. While more people were deployed to try to direct people up and down the line by the afternoon, more and more voters arrived and joined the crowd. Some dragged chairs along to sit while waiting in line. Parents corralled children. Pallets of water bottles were brought out and placed around the arena floor. Reported wait times stretched to six, even eight hours.“I want the public to know that I don’t think that any of us could have predicted what transpired the night of the elections,” Thompson said. “It didn’t just happen in Cascade County. It happened everywhere.”It was same-day registration that reportedly caused eight-hour waits in Gallatin County, according to multiple reports. While the final voter cast a ballot just after midnight in Cascade County, it was 4 a.m. in Gallatin. The line stretched around the block in Missoula County at midday. A smaller but not insignificant line of 2.5 hours was reported in Lewis and Clark County.But the frustration at the ExpoPark was palpable. People didn’t have the time to wait in line for hours, and many left, sacrificing their vote. Some used the words “voter suppression” to characterize the county’s actions.“We did hear that from people in line,” said Mangan. “The voters themselves said they felt like this was voter suppression as a term that they used.”Mangan was at the ExpoPark all day as part of the Montana Election Observation Initiative, a project of the Carter Center that trained volunteers to observe elections across Montana. The effort included 120 observers at 76 polling locations in 16 counties. The organization is preparing a full report for release later this month, but it released initial findings that said “high turnout and limited staffing led to long lines and delays for both voting and same-day registration at some locations.”Mangan said it was tough to see, especially as people became discouraged enough to abandon the line. He recalled one voter who simply had to catch the evening bus.“It was frustrating to watch,” he said. “I’ve been around elections for a long time, and it was frustrating. Personally, with MTEOI, we can’t assist. We’re there to observe. I think where our assistance will come in is when we release our report.”Election judges were also strained on Election Day. A new state law requires judges to count ballots without pause until finished. Previously, larger counties allowed breaks for judges to rest. That meant that after county staff were able to clear the registration line, election judges — almost exclusively elderly people — had to work without pause on an overnight count after working a full day. Chris Christiaens, the chief election judge at the ExpoPark, explained the incredible strain that judges felt, starting early in the morning on Election Day and working through the night. He said one person passed out during the work.“When people get really busy and you don’t receive the ballots from the last voter until after midnight, frankly I call it elder abuse,” Christiaens said during a county meeting on Tuesday.At 7:30 a.m. on Nov. 6, the county sent the last vote tally report to the secretary of state. Christiaens said 10 judges told him they would never do this again.Terry Thompson poses for a photo in her office on Nov. 13, 2024, a week after Election Day. Credit: Matt Hudson / MTFPThompson rejects the idea that the county suppressed anyone’s right to vote. Still, it was a painful nine-month introduction to the high-profile position, she said. She thought about quitting at times.“I didn’t go into this blind,” she said. “I knew there would be public scrutiny. But I wasn’t prepared for the level of the continuation.”Pre-election staff issues followed Thompson into the post-election canvass, which faced multiple delays this week. Thompson discovered 117 absentee ballots from seven precincts that had not been counted but erroneously put in boxes for signature affirmation envelopes that shouldn’t have contained ballots. In prior elections, affirmation envelopes were opened earlier by staff at the election office and then prepared for judges to open the secrecy envelopes on Election Day. Citing staff challenges prior to Election Day, Thompson had decided to bring the unopened affirmation envelopes to the ExpoPark to be opened on Election Day and handed off to judges there. It created a bulk of envelopes to open and sort on Nov. 4 and 5. Thompson said the error likely happened at ExpoPark while working through the envelopes.The canvassing board met twice early in the week to discuss issues and to postpone the actual count. During one of those meetings on Tuesday, a somber Thompson explained the situation to the board.“I apologize that this type of error even happened under my watch,” she said.The error prompted a hand recount of the seven impacted precincts, which begins Thursday at the ExpoPark. Thompson said they were able to find adequate staff to conduct it.The error emboldened Merchant’s supporters, who this week have filled public comment opportunities to call for the resignations of commissioners Briggs and Larson and to criticize Thompson’s appointment. Assuming the recounts are complete, the canvass is set to resume on Monday.While wrapping up the 2024 election, Thompson is now in the process of hiring for the staff positions she received in the 2025 budget. She has vowed to make sure the mistakes in 2024 don’t happen again.“And I would love to get the black eye off of Cascade County,” she said.In-depth, independent reporting on the stories impacting your community from reporters who know your town.The post Behind the scenes of a turbulent 2024 election in Cascade County appeared first on Montana Free Press.