What happens after voters turn in their ballots or visit the polls?MTPR’s Austin Amestoy sat down with Montana Association of Clerks and Recorders president Eric Semerad to find out how ballots are handled and counted.
Austin Amestoy: I'm here with Eric Semerad, who's currently serving as Gallatin County's election administrator. Eric, thanks for being here.
Eric Semerad: Thank you.
Austin Amestoy: So let's start with a question here about early voting. Absentee ballots, of course, went out to voters who requested them, in mid-October. What happens to those ballots after a county election office receives them?
Eric Semerad: Yeah, well, the ballots come in, whether by mail or in the ballot boxes. They come in and we sort them all by the various different ballot styles that we have in Gallatin County. That's 91 different styles. Then those ballots go — when they're batched up — go to be received and we scan them in — they all have barcodes into the elect Montana software that is the Secretary of State's software product. And then it goes to another person who is responsible for reviewing and verifying the signatures on every single ballot.
Austin Amestoy: So vote counting can begin before Election Day in Montana, Eric, is that right?
Eric Semerad: It can for large counties. The smaller counties only can do this process on Election day. On Monday, we can only count during business hours, 8 to 5. But once we start counting on Election Day, we cannot stop until we've finished counting. And so that for us, for these large elections, has gone into late Wednesday, pretty much every federal election. It's just the normal process for us.
Austin Amestoy: And that's the other thing I was going to ask you, is when Montanans might know the results for races on election night, I know that there's such a broad variance there. But what can they expect?
Eric Semerad: Gallatin County is 84% absentee, and so we're having a good fraction of the ballots already here in the office ready to be counted on Monday. When the line is done voting on election night, which we anticipate that to be a very long line —our early voting lines have been quite long — so when that line is done, we can release results. So we're hoping to get that by 11 p.m. on election night, but we can't do it until we have all those people voted.
Austin Amestoy: So the more the moral of the story here, what I'm hearing, is Montanans should expect that results for some races, especially ones that may be particularly close, could take a while to come in just due to the sheer bulk of votes to count.
Eric Semerad: Yes. And, you know, one of the requirements for this continuous count is that we have to report every three hours in the Secretary of State's system. So as the bulk of the ballots get put in there, those races will be narrowed down.
Austin Amestoy: Eric, I want to pivot here to the topic of election security and ask you a question on this. And I want to start with this recent headline from Montana that actually sort of made the national rounds out of Glacier County. There was a Democratic campaign staffer seen on video touching a ballot drop off box. Then the county attorney there investigated, said there was no evidence of an attempt to tamper with the box. But the reason I bring it up is because that story feels like a symptom of the increased scrutiny toward election security that we've seen in recent years. I'm sure you're well familiar with. So I wanted to ask you, what steps do counties take to ensure that elections are secure? What does that look like in practice?
Eric Semerad: Right. So, you know, this has all been put into rule by the Secretary of State's office. There's so many different things that we have to do now to go along with the processes that we do.
One is, we have logs and seals for all of our equipment. All the tabulators have to be sealed every single time we use them. And when we're done, you know, we seal them up and we keep a log of that. The batches of ballots also have a reconciliation sheet that goes with them and says exactly what ballots are in there, what style, how many. And we keep our batches, typically, we limit them to 30. During the day on Election Day, we're going to send runners out to pick up absentee ballot boxes from all the polling places. When we do that, they go out with log sheets that shows that they dropped the ballot box off, or they picked it up and they signed off on it, and the election judges on the location of the polling place signs off on it. And so it can all be traced back.
Austin Amestoy: Eric, is there anything I didn't ask you about that you want to make sure our listeners know about the work that you guys do?
Eric Semerad: You know, this is a really big election. It's the biggest — you know, I've been doing this for 35 years and I've never seen the response so passionate for the voters. Yet, you know, we have big long lines here at the courthouse and it's all been very polite and cordial. And people, the voters, are so appreciative of the service they're getting, even though they're waiting over an hour in line before Election Day. And so, you know, it's, it's really amazing to me how well things are going with elections here in Montana and here in Gallatin County.
Austin Amestoy: Once again, Gallatin County Election Administrator Eric Semerad, helping us answer some frequently asked voter questions. Eric, thanks for being here.
Eric Semerad: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
