by Travis Mateer

Wow. I mean, just WOW! I know Montana’s state legislature is one of our elected leaders FAVORITE scapegoats, but how can the state be blamed for what happened under Bradley Seaman’s watchful eye?

Enter Gomer, who doesn’t want me to see his trash-rag’s links on the Twitter because I’m so seasoned in identifying his wily methods.

All the other media reports I’ve seen have rightfully identified the error in Tuesday’s failure as human. Meaning, it was a HUMAN who didn’t clear the test results. Which human? It doesn’t matter, the buck should stop at Seaman.

But did you know the difficult task of running a test on the machines that tabulate your votes was FORCED on poor Seaman by the legislature? And did you know a type of tabulator wasn’t allowed? Did this add to delays? That’s not Gomer’s point, the point is to protect Brad from accountability, and it starts with some disinformation in the title about TECHNICAL GLITCHES. From the link (emphasis mine):

A few unusual circumstances caused a few of Montana’s larger counties to issue their election results a little later than in past years.

Missoula County is often one of the earlier counties to post its initial report. But the Elections Office was unable to issue its 8:30 p.m. report due to a technical problem.

Um, no. It was a HUMAN error, something I reported on yesterday, in the snow, where no Gomer could be seen.

After misrepresenting the nature of the error, Gomer provides this state-centric perspective:

The 2021 Legislature passed Senate Bill 351, which requires county election offices to test their voting tabulation machines a day prior to the election. The Missoula County office had run that test on Monday.

Then the Elections Office processed all the absentee ballots it had already received. Although many voters had already mailed their ballots in, many dropped their absentee ballots off at the Elections Center on Tuesday because there was reportedly a line of cars extending about three blocks about midday.

Missoula County elections administrator Bradley Seaman said the workers were double-checking the initial report they produced at 8 p.m. and noticed some numbers from the tabulators didn’t match those from the reporting software.

Some trouble-shooting revealed that some numbers that had been used for testing the day before hadn’t been cleared from the software.

“We cleared that out and updated those reports before the midnight run of reports so it was an accurate and clear report,” Seaman said.

Missoula County also used to use M100 tabulators to count ballots and votes at several precincts. In 2022, the state of Montana no longer certified the M100 machines, so now all ballots are processed at the elections office. It’s not known whether that adds to the delay.

Isn’t this impressive? What else would you expect from a guy (Martin Kidston) who used to be a literal spokesperson for Democrats in Montana.

Tomorrow I’ll continue looking at the BLAME OTHERS campaign being waged by two separate interests.

So stay tuned, and thanks for reading this special election report!