County Calls Mail-in Election a Success; Candidates Aren't So Sure

Though it took three hours to count the ballots, Missoula County elections officials pronounced the first mail-in City Council election a success late Tuesday because it produced a voter turnout of 46 percent.

Missoula County Clerk and Recorder Vickie Zeier said the county decided to hold a mail-in only election to increase voter turnout and solve staff problems at polling stations. It worked on both counts, she added.

“For a City Council election without a mayoral race, the turnout is usually between 12 and 18 percent,” Zeier said. “If the ballot is right in front of them, people are more likely to vote.”

Zeier and an exhausted staff of 60 finished counting the ballots at 11 p.m., three hours after the election closed. Zeier said that the office received about 2,200 ballots in the last 24 hours, along with quite a few walk-up voter registrations, which delayed the official counting.

Though ballots started coming in immediately after they were mailed out three weeks ago, Zeier said that the office is not allowed to count them until the day of the election.

The biggest rush of returned ballots came during the first week after they were mailed out, Zeier said. The second onslaught occurred during the last three days of the election.

For many of the City Council candidates, this fast return rate meant that they had to scramble to reach voters before they mailed in their ballots.

Jason Wiener, who won his Ward 1 race against Justin Armintrout with 64 percent of the vote, said that while the new system increased voter turnout, it made campaigning more difficult.

“I had to go for a broader audience of those people voting who don’t usually vote,” Wiener said. “I had to contact everyone who was going to vote three weeks earlier than I had planned.”

Wiener said that though he originally thought that three weeks between mailing and the election was too long, he was grateful for the cushion that it provided for mistakes.

Justin Armintrout, Wiener’s opponent, said that the three-week period places more emphasis on the day that voters receive their ballots in the mail, rather than the actual day of the election.

“It really took the oomph out of my campaign,” Armintrout said. “Last minute issues come up and voters don’t have time to change their votes.”

Armintrout said that he would favor reducing the time period to two weeks or less in future elections so that candidates have more time to reach voters.

Ward 2 incumbent Don Nicholson, who lost his bid for a third term to Pam Walzer, said that he wasn’t sure if the mail-in system affected his race because the new voters may not have been informed about his position.

“Whether that 30 percent knew what they were voting on is the question,” Nicholson said. “If they took the time to read my stuff and didn’t like it, at least they understood what I was trying to do.”

Ward 4’s Jerry Ballas, who was also defeated in his reelection bid, said that the system directly affected the result of his race because he didn’t have enough time to get his information to voters.

Before his race was officially decided, Ballas said that in hindsight, he would have started campaigning two weeks earlier. He also said that community events for the public to get to know the candidates were scheduled too late.

Other problems with the system included missing signatures on the ballot envelopes, the mailing of 178 ballots to the wrong recipients and ballots returned to the Elections Office marked undeliverable.

Zeier said that every effort was made to track down individuals who hadn’t signed their ballot envelopes before the election and to re-mail ballots to those who had either received the wrong one or hadn’t received one at all.

Of the 51,388 ballots that were mailed out, 4,800 were undeliverable. Zeier said that 2,000 of those belonged to Missoula County residents who hadn’t updated their information, as opposed to city residents.

In the September primary election, about 11,000 of 42,000 ballots were undeliverable. The Elections Office inferred that most of these ballots belonged to college students with outdated voter information.

“I think it went a lot better with the undeliverable ballots this time around,” Zeier said.

Zeier said that she also received a few complaints from people who feared that their signatures on the outside of ballot envelopes could lead to identity theft. Overall, she said, complaints about the new system were minimal.

- By LAUREN RUSSELL