HELENA, Mont. — On Tuesday, Montana’s Supreme Court said that petitions to put constitutional proposals on the November ballot, such as one to protect abortion rights, could include the signatures of people who don’t vote.
Judge Mike Menahan of District Court said last Tuesday that Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen’s office changed election rules in a wrong way by rejecting signatures from inactive voters on three ballot initiatives. This happened after the signatures had been turned in to counties and some of them had been checked. As part of the change to long-standing policies, the state’s election software had to be reprogrammed.
Last Thursday, Jacobsen’s office asked the Montana Supreme Court for an emergency order to stop Menahan’s decision, which gave counties until this Wednesday to check the signatures of inactive voters that had been turned down. Lawyers for groups backing the ballot initiatives and the Secretary of State’s Office agreed to the terms of the order that stopped the Secretary from making changes.
The judges said that Jacobsen’s office did not meet the requirements for an emergency order because she had not shown them that Menahan was acting in error.
However, the justices wrote, “We also disagree with Jacobsen that the TRO is causing a gross injustice. Jacobsen’s actions in reprogramming the petition-processing software after county election administrators had started processing petitions created the circumstances that led to this litigation.”
A hearing on a court order to stop the changes will take place on Friday before Menahan.
Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights and Montanans for Election Reform, the groups that sued, said that the state had been accepting the signatures of inactive voters for decades. An inactive voter is someone who filed a universal change of address form but then didn’t respond when the county tried to confirm their address. They can become active voters again by giving their location, going to the polls, or asking for an absentee ballot.
Supporters of the measure to protect the state constitution’s right to abortion access said that more than enough signatures had been checked by Friday’s deadline so that it could be on the ballot. People who support bills to make primaries neutral and to make it so that a candidate needs a majority of the vote to win an election have said they also think they have enough signatures.
