High-turnout, High-consequence Election Could Spell a Late Night for Election Officials in Flathead County

By the time the after-work rush began arriving in earnest at the Flathead County Fairgrounds on Tuesday, election workers had already been on duty for more than 10 hours, accommodating a steady procession of people trying to cast their vote on Election Day.

“It’s crazy. It’s been crazy all day,” Paula Buff, the Flathead County’s interim election administrator, said from behind a poll pad terminal. “We are experiencing very high turnout.”

That high-turnout volume had been building for weeks across Montana, with 425,000 absentee ballots from across the state having been marked as returned heading into Election Day. County election offices mailed absentee ballot packets to active, registered absentee voters on Oct. 11. That means more than 77% of all absentee ballots issued statewide had been returned heading into Election Day.

For context, a little over 612,000 total ballots were cast in the state’s 2020 general election.

In Flathead County, which is home to 69,389 active voters and 14,619 inactive, residents had returned 47,174 absentee ballots as of Nov. 5 out of the 56,037 mailed to voters, for an 84.18% return rate.

But not everyone voted early in-person or by mail, as evidenced by the throngs of voters who waited in line Tuesday to register to vote or receive their ballots.

Bert Blyth, an election worker who’d been on his feet all day, said a steady stream of traffic had snaked around the fairgrounds all day without remitting.

“It hasn’t really stopped,” Blyth said.

According to Buff, election officials will continue to accommodate voters at Flathead County polling places right up until polls close at 8 p.m. Voters who step into line right at the deadline will receive a card, and all polling places are required to “clear the lines” before results are reported.

“If you’re in line by 8 p.m., we’ll make sure your vote gets counted,” Buff said. “But that means it could take hours before we clear the lines at our busiest polling places.”

For Bailey Owens, a 20-year-old Whitefish woman voting in a general election for her first time, Election Day had entailed driving between Whitefish and Kalispell trying to find her correct polling place. When she tried to vote at the Whitefish Community Center, Owens said she was instructed to vote at the Flathead County Fairgrounds; but after waiting in line at the fairgrounds, she was told to go to the Whitefish Armory.

“It’s frustrating because even though this is my first election I thought I knew where I was supposed to go,” Owens said, a voter confirmation card in hand. “I was told to not even show my voter confirmation card and just show them my ID because the confirmation cards show the wrong precincts.”

At 5 p.m., Owens was preparing to head back to Whitefish, where she was determined to cast a ballot.

“I am determined because this election feels really important,” she said, expressing her support for Constitutional Initiative 128, which, if passed, would secure the right to abortion by expressly defining it in the state constitution. “It feels important for women, for young women, and I’m a young woman and I’m going to vote to protect women’s reproductive health and health care choices.”

Flanking the perimeter of the fairgrounds, volunteers handed voters literature asking them to either support or oppose CI-128. Mackenzie Johnson, of Kalispell, was among those urging voters to oppose CI-128, saying that “a lot of misinformation” surrounding the initiative had convinced women that abortion would be banned in Montana if the initiative failed.

“I just want women to understand that we already have this right, that it’s not going to be banned just because this doesn’t pass,” Johnson said.

 CI-128, would amend the Montana constitution to expressly provide a right to “make and carry out decisions about one’s own pregnancy, including the right to abortion.” If the initiative fails, pro-choice advocates say there is a greater likelihood that the state Legislature will enact more restrictive laws, which lawmakers won’t be able to do if it passes.