The race for Montana's top election administrator

Alex Sakariassen

Montana Free Press

Election officials across Montana have endured intense public skepticism and scrutiny over the past four years. Every step and procedure in the elections they oversee has been poked and prodded by citizen watchdogs, discussed and debated by conservative lawmakers, and tested and retested by election officials themselves. The task they face is a daunting and important one: continue to administer a system Montanans have long depended on to select their political representatives and, while doing so, convince a meaningful minority of distrustful citizens that the system, while imperfect, isn’t broken.

As Election Day approaches, Montana voters will inevitably turn to one office in particular, that of the secretary of state, for assurance that the results of the 2024 election and those in the years to come are accurate and well-vetted. Whether the future of that responsibility falls to incumbent Republican Christi Jacobsen will be decided Nov. 5 as, after one term in office, she attempts to fend off a pair of challengers: Democrat Jesse Mullen, a newspaper owner from Deer Lodge, and Libertarian John Lamb, a farmer, builder and scrap-car-hauler from Norris. 

Much of the criticism leveled at the electoral process — some of which her fellow conservatives have aimed at Jacobsen — has been attributed to former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Trump’s presence on this year’s ballot, and his continuing rhetoric undermining public confidence in election security, heightens the challenge, and several groups have already mobilized. The Atlanta-based nonprofit Carter Center, aided by former Montana Commissioner of Political Practices and Democratic legislator Jeff Mangan and former Republican state Rep. Geraldine Custer, has partnered with the University of Montana’s Mansfield Center to recruit and train local volunteers to observe the general election in 16 Montana counties. The international Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights has separately dispatched two election observers to monitor Montana’s process. Both initiatives will produce reports documenting their findings and conclusions about the administration of Montana’s 2024 election.



“It’s going to take work and it’s going to take a leader or leaders without any political bias to get there,” Mangan said of restoring trust and countering misinformation in Montana’s elections.

Jacobsen as well has embarked on a program of election-year voter education, investing in a series of animated videos detailing nearly every aspect of the election process in Montana. The series, produced by an Idaho-based contractor and released last spring, prominently features an animated Jacobsen as narrator and covers everything from voter registration to the ballot tabulation process. In an email exchange with Montana Free Press, Jacobsen spokesperson Richie Melby likened the videos to the classic 1970s Schoolhouse Rock! series and claimed the office has “received great feedback from voters and from county election officials.” He declined to say how much Jacobsen spent on the project.

“As Montana’s chief election official, Secretary Jacobsen and our team are always looking for innovative ways to provide important information to Montana voters,” Melby wrote via email, noting the office’s use of public service announcements, social media posts and in-person appearances to educate the public about ballot access and voter rights. 

Despite Jacobsen’s efforts to convince voters of the strides she’s made as Montana’s top election official over the past four years, Mullen and Lamb argue that her tenure has been marked by costly legal battles, botched electoral guidance and an inability to take decisive action. Neither believes Jacobsen is capable of effectively advocating for Montana’s election systems or voters at a time when they say such advocacy is sorely needed. Lamb and Mullen have voiced particular disappointment in what they see as a lack of transparency from Jacobsen’s administration. 

“I don’t think Montanans should inherently trust politicians. I covered way too many for me to ever make that suggestion,” Mullen said, referencing his own background in journalism. “What I do expect is for public officials to operate in a way that provides complete transparency and allows for accountability.”



Between Aug. 2 and Oct. 11, MTFP made a dozen requests via email and voicemail to Jacobsen’s campaign for an in-person interview with the incumbent, all of which went unacknowledged. The secretary of state’s office similarly did not acknowledge an email asking that Jacobsen be informed of her campaign’s unresponsiveness. In a final email last week, MTFP informed Jacobsen’s campaign spokesperson, Steve Walsh, of this story’s impending deadline and offered Walsh the opportunity to provide a statement on the candidate’s behalf. That email also went unacknowledged. Throughout her 2020 campaign and subsequent tenure in office, Jacobsen has invariably declined invitations to participate in interviews or provide direct comment to MTFP. (Jacobsen’s campaign did provide written responses to MTFP’s 2024 candidate questionnaire.) 

In separate interviews with MTFP, Mullen and Lamb both vowed to take a different approach, saying they would adopt open-door policies with Montana’s press corps and the public at large. Lamb (who did not participate in MTFP’s 2024 candidate questionnaire) said he sees the secretary of state’s office as a fundamentally bipartisan post in state government, beholden to citizens of all political stripes. He specifically referenced an episode this summer when Jacobsen sought to disqualify ballot-qualifying signatures from inactive voters on a trio of Republican-opposed constitutional initiatives — a dispute Jacobsen lost in state court.

“She was trying to exclude certain signatures on there just over a technicality and she lost,” Lamb said. “Those are things that I would make sure that people in Montana got a voice, [that] their signatures do matter.”

Jacobsen also recently took steps to revive a lawsuit involving changes to key election procedures passed with primarily Republican support during the 2021 Legislature, including the elimination of same-day voter registration and a more stringent set of photo identification requirements for poll voters. The Montana Supreme Court this spring declared those laws unconstitutional, and Jacobsen filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court in August in an effort to have the now-blocked laws reinstated. Her office has routinely attributed the legal fight to Jacobsen’s broader effort to shore up Republican-perceived weaknesses in Montana’s election system, specifically regarding voter eligibility and ballot security — opportunities for systemic improvement that Jacobsen reiterated in her response to MTFP’s candidate questionnaire earlier this year.



“Montana is the gold standard for elections in many ways because we recognize there is always room for improvement,” Jacobsen’s response read. “I’ll continue to advocate for changes to make our elections more secure, protected from foreign actors and easily accessible.”



Mullen and Lamb each told MTFP they would defend same-day voter registration, though Mullen acknowledged that the process does add to the already intensive workload required of county election workers. Regardless, Mullen said, it’s not up to the secretary of state to make “judgment calls” on whether someone who didn’t register prior to Election Day deserves to vote.

“You can’t read their mind,” Mullen said. “You don’t know exactly what they’re going through. You’re there to provide a service, and you’re there to provide it in a way that works for them.”

Jacobsen has also promoted her work on improving the other core function of the secretary of state’s office: business services. She’s spoken of cutting bureaucracy and reducing fees for businesses registering with the state or updating paperwork. Lamb had little criticism of Jacobsen’s tenure in that regard, noting that his biggest focus in that area, if elected, would be to emphasize services available to small businesses and help educate business owners about why certain registration procedures exist. While he recognizes that the Libertarian value regarding government is to have less of it, Lamb said he wouldn’t reduce staff or eliminate services currently offered to Montana businesses.

“I would definitely scale back as much as I could with that office to not be so pushy with anybody who didn’t need the services,” said Lamb, who owns a Norris-based shed and greenhouse construction business as well as a Bozeman-based service offering free scrap-car hauling. “But if they need it, we’re there for that service. We’re working for them. That’s what the taxpayers are paying for.”

Mullen’s read on the business services side of the office is much more critical. He said he’s heard Montana business owners express frustration with the functionality of the secretary of state’s website, which became the sole avenue for businesses to file following former Secretary of State Corey Stapleton’s 2017 move to eliminate paper filing. Absent a more user-friendly system, Mullen said, the burden of navigating business services has fallen to business owners themselves, many of whom are older and less computer savvy in Montana’s smaller communities.

“They’re not creating jobs in Montana, they are not helping our rural communities in any kind of meaningful way,” Mullen said, pointing to a row of boarded-up office buildings just off Deer Lodge’s main drag. “This town alone just lost one of its two pharmacies. Now we’re down to one. … These [elected] positions really do have impact and sway and influence.”

But in many ways, it’s the continuing rash of election skepticism — and Jacobsen’s handling of it — that has inspired this year’s challengers. 

Mullen recalled attending a public meeting in 2020 about whether Powell County would conduct that year’s election entirely by mail, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. One group, which he described as “dressed up in Revolutionary War gear, a couple of them wearing Guy Fawkes masks,” loudly voiced their disapproval. The county’s clerk and recorder invited some of them to volunteer as election workers, Mullen continued, and once they saw the process up close, they became regular volunteers. By educating them, he said, Powell County’s election office created “fierce advocates” for maintaining the integrity of Montana’s elections.

Lamb expressed a similarly keen interest in helping educate Montana citizens — even its most ardent critics — on the election process.

“I believe that is the job of the secretary of state to work for everyone no matter what party they are, to inform them, to let them know what’s going on and take every resource possible,” Lamb said. “That’s their job, and that’s a great job, to just educate the people.”



Voter education is a timely and critical function given the increased pressure, stress and even fear local election workers nationwide have experienced since 2020. Most recently, a discrepancy in the June primary election results in Butte-Silver Bow County helped to resurrect broader legislative debate over election integrity statewide. The situation — reportedly the result of human error involving roughly 1,100 votes being counted twice — was resolved in August through multiple recounts that confirmed the election results. 

The incident prompted Republican Senate leaders to form a select committee on elections, which this month met to discuss a range of potential new policies, including requiring local election officials to compile “cast vote records.” The digital documents are essentially a spreadsheet of every vote processed by an individual tabulating machine, with each row representing a single ballot. A bill introduced during the 2023 Legislature sought just such a requirement but died due to concerns that the records — sought by election skeptics ostensibly to facilitate citizen election audits — would violate the Montana Constitution’s guarantee of ballot secrecy.

That’s a concern Gallatin County Clerk and Recorder Eric Semerad reiterated to lawmakers on the select committee last week, and while Semerad acknowledged that not everyone can observe everything local election officials do to ensure safe and accurate elections, he lamented the social climate underlying the supposed need for such policies.

“It’s difficult, as an election administrator and somebody that’s worked in elections for 35 years, to not be trusted by people when we’ve been doing this thing for a really long time,” Semerad said. “We take our jobs very seriously.”

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https://montanafreepress.org/2024/10/15/ongoing-election-skepticism-key-factor-in-montana-2024-secretary-of-state-race/