Concerned about an approaching deadline that would allow the county to destroy ballots from the 2020 Election, a group of citizens asked Yellowstone County Commissioners to store the ballots beyond that deadline in order to allow the group time to go through a process that would allow them to essentially do their own audit of the election. State law allows the documents to be destroyed after 22 months.
Said one woman in the group, “It’s imperative that we keep those records. We have too many questions.” Fueling many of their questions is a report from an organization called Final Frontier in Pennsylvania that conducted a study about private funding of elections across the country.
Yellowstone County’s Elections Department Director Bret Rutherford explained that they need the space in which the ballots and envelopes are kept in order to store ballots that will be coming from the General Election in November. The County Commissioners said they would find space on the 8th floor of the Court House.
The citizens, whose primary spokesperson has been Peggy Miller, Laurel, formed an organization called Montanans in Action, which in April approached commissioners with questions about accepting a $320,593 grant from a Chicago-based non-profit called Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to help fund the costs of the 2020 election. They became alarmed about the funding when they learned that most of the money distributed to counties throughout the country was contributed by Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. Yellowstone County received one of the largest donations in the country, which Montanans in Action find puzzling.
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