How Montana Ballots Become Election Results

As of Sunday Nov. 3, more than 395,00 Montana voters had submitted their ballots for the 2024 general election, according to the secretary of state. Others spent portions of their Monday casting their votes early at county election offices using a one-time absentee option. Even more will flock to the polls Tuesday to stand at a booth and fill in the bubbles next to their candidates of choice.

How exactly do all those paper ballots transform into the official results flashed on television and computer screens come election night? The answer to that question is what keeps local election workers busy well ahead of Election Day, and well past it. It’s also something that has generated intense interest and, at times, skepticism among voters across the state.

At MTFP, where we’ve been covering election procedures for years, we spoke with local election officials in Missoula, Gallatin and Lewis and Clark counties to help readers better understand how votes are being counted this week.

In the case of absentee ballots submitted via mail and in person, the count is already underway in many parts of the state. Montana election law allows counties with more than 8,000 registered voters or more than 5,000 absentee voters to process absentee ballots three business days ahead of an election and to begin counting those ballots the Monday before Election Day. That work starts with county staff and volunteers sorting ballots based on the mix of district- and precinct-specific races listed on them, then marking ballots as “received” in the state’s election system.

From there, the signature on each absentee ballot envelope is verified against past examples of a voter’s signature in the state system. Any discrepancies are reviewed by multiple election workers, and, if a signature is missing or rejected, the county attempts to contact the voter directly to resolve the issue. Once a signature is accepted, the secrecy envelope containing the ballot is removed from the signature envelope. The ballot itself is later removed from the deidentified secrecy envelope, flattened out and kept secure alongside the other ballots in its batch until they’re sent to an electronic tabulating machine for vote counting. Each of those steps is recorded on a sheet that accompanies each bundle of ballots through the entire process.

A similar process will be applied tomorrow across Montana to ballots cast at the polls, where voters will deposit their completed ballots in collection boxes. The number of ballots collected in those boxes will be recorded throughout the day, and, once the polls close at 8 p.m., election workers will verify the totals. In many counties, the collection boxes will then be transported from polling locations to a centralized tabulating center under the watch of two election judges. The boxes are accompanied by corresponding pollbooks, which contain the recorded signatures of every voter who cast a ballot at that particular polling place on Election Day.

After polls close at 8 p.m., election workers will begin to put the ballots through the same electronic tabulating machines used to process absentee ballots. The machines themselves — manufactured by Nevada-based ES&S, Montana’s sole certified provider of election equipment — are required by law to be publicly tested for accuracy in the weeks before the election. Batches of voted ballots will be sent through the machines, with the number of processed ballots once more checked and verified. If a machine can’t process a ballot for some reason, perhaps because the voter filled in too many bubbles for a single race or used an ink color the tabulator can’t read, the ballot is flagged and sent to a bipartisan panel of election judges to make sure the voter’s intent is accurately reflected in the night’s final tallies.

Election workers will pull vote totals from each machine throughout the night using a special ES&S-supplied thumb drive and upload them to a secure computer isolated from the internet. Countywide results will be pulled in turn from that computer and uploaded through a separate computer to the secretary of state’s election system.

Voters will see those results reflected in updates to Montana’s online election dashboard. At the same time, poll-watchers and journalists at election offices across the state will be handed printed copies of local results, data that can sometimes let news outlets like the Associated Press report results faster than they appear on the official state dashboard.

The Associated Press also produces race call predictions based on current returns and historical results. In some cases, those race calls are issued before a majority of ballots involving a race are counted based on the agency’s ability to predict the likely political breakdown of a district’s voters.

Despite a wave of skepticism among some conservatives in recent years, Montana’s ballot counting process has been routinely described as fair, accurate and secure by state and local officials of all political stripes. State law has numerous long-established safeguards as well, allowing political parties to recruit poll watchers to monitor local Election Day procedures and requiring randomized post-election audits and county canvasses to double check and certify the results.

Organizations such as the nonprofit Carter Center have also launched independent observation initiatives this year to report on the security and efficacy of Montana’s practices. And, as added insurance, once the secretary of state has proclaimed the results of the 2024 general election official, Montana law requires county election officials to seal and lock away every single ballot for a minimum of 22 months so they’re available to reference in any recounts, challenges or appeals.