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Ballot Reprinting Delayed While Libertarians Sort Dispute

Rick Breckenridge of Proctor said Thursday he accepted the party's request to run

By MATT VOLZ, Associated Press

HELENA — An internal dispute over who speaks for Montana’s Libertarian Party after the death of its chairman and U.S. House candidate is delaying the state from certifying a replacement candidate and county election officials from printing new ballots.

Rick Breckenridge of Proctor filed his paperwork with Secretary of State Linda McCulloch’s office on Thursday after the Ravalli County Libertarian Central Committee chose him to replace Mike Fellows in the U.S. House race. Fellows, the longtime state chairman of the Libertarian Party, died Monday night in a car crash after a campaign event in Seeley Lake.

“We’ve received the filing, but we’ve not processed it until we’ve figured out who is the ranking member of the Libertarian Party,” McCulloch said.

The Ravalli County committee, the only organized Libertarian Party committee in the state, elected as its chairman David Merrick, which makes him the ranking member, Merrick and Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Ted Dunlap said.

But another party faction backing a candidate other than Breckenridge told McCulloch’s office that Roger Roots, the party’s candidate for secretary of state, is the ranking party member after Fellow’s death, Dunlap said.

“We hardly have any dissent,” Merrick said. “All of a sudden, Michael dies and it’s some sort of a melee.”

Roots, who is a volunteer paralegal for Ryan Bundy in the case of last year’s armed takeover of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, did not return calls and emails for comment.

Fellows was making his eighth run for the House seat against the Republican incumbent, Rep. Ryan Zinke, and Democrat Denise Juneau. Merrick said he and Fellows had discussed three possible replacement candidates in August, when Fellows’ kidney problems had made him very ill — Breckenridge, Merrick and Dan Cox, who ran for U.S. Senate in 2012.

Montana law says that if a candidate dies less than 85 days before the general election, the political party has five days to appoint a replacement candidate. The Libertarian Party’s deadline is Monday, but Merrick and Dunlap said they’d hoped to speed up the process by selecting Breckenridge quickly.

“I’m saddened the secretary of state is now having to hold off on this,” Dunlap said.

Roots and Merrick are communicating and Dunlap said he believes the dispute will be resolved quickly.

The uncertainty over Fellows’ replacement creates a new headache for Montana’s county election administrators, who must print corrected ballots when a new candidate is named and will likely miss a Friday deadline to mail ballots to military and overseas voters.

Election administrators already had to delay printing their ballots once earlier this month over questions of another Libertarian candidate’s eligibility. Montana Republican Party Chairman Jeff Essmann sued the state in a failed attempt to remove Roots from the ballot in the secretary of state race.

“We were relieved when that was all done, and now we’re back to square one,” said Cascade County election administrator Rina Moore.

Moore said officials in her office are unstuffing approximately 25,000 absentee ballots that had already been placed in envelopes. She estimated it will take about three days to re-print the corrected ballots once she gets the green light from the secretary of state’s office.

“I will have our printers run around the clock,” she said.