Montana News
A ballot blunder, border bluster and a broken bibliography
(upbeat music) - Next up, campaign beat, a weekly political analysis program produced by Montana Public Radio. Campaign beat is hosted by Sally Mock and features Lee newspaper, state news bureau chief Holly Michaels and Rob Saldine of the University of Montana's Mansfield Center and political science department. Here's Sally. - Holly, we found out this week that online ballots sent out early from the Montana Secretary of State's office to Montana's living overseas, omitted the name of the Democratic nominee for president Kamala Harris. And this error was quickly corrected, but Holly questions remain about how and why it happened. - Yeah, Sally, we don't have a ton of clarity about those two things, the how and the why. This error was through the electronic absentee system for overseas voters who are eligible to vote through this online portal. And that's under the uniformed and overseas Citizen Absentee Voting Act. That system opened up to voters at 8 a.m. on September 20th. And then shortly after that, a voter originally from the flathead who's living out of the country right now hopped online to go vote and noticed, like you said, that Vice President Harris's name was not on that electronic ballot. That's according to reporting from the Daily Interlake. From that point, election officials were informed of the issue, and that whole online voting portal was taken down. The vendor that the state uses to operate that, which is a company out of St. Louis, then jumped in to fix the air. And in the meantime, county officials who hadn't yet sent out those electronic ballots were told to hold off while the correction was made. And then by that afternoon, everything was up and running again. Obviously, Secretary of State Christy Jacobson, a Republican, has been adamant in saying that this was a short lived air and not intentional. And elections workers around the state have echoed that Missoula's top election official told the website Pulitzer fact that this was not an intentional action. But, like I said earlier, no one's really offered up an explanation of how this happened. And we don't know how many people are actually affected either. Jacobson said that very few voters may have been initially affected, but it's not clear what that number is. And the office did say that the issue was corrected for anyone who got that problematic ballot. So they did have a correct one to vote from. - Well, Rob, Secretary of State, Jacobson has taken offense at criticism over this mistake. And she's implying it's been blown out of proportion and people shouldn't be getting their panties in a wad over it. But election integrity is a huge issue this campaign season. And it's like she isn't reading the room. - Yeah, right Sally. It's hard to decide whether this episode is amusing or disconcerting. Maybe it's a little bit of both. It sure doesn't inspire very much confidence. I do agree that it's hard to imagine that this was intentional. It's just such a glaring and obvious problem that it would be ridiculous and ultimately pointless to try to do something like this on purpose. So I certainly assume it was a mistake. And yet, you know, there are a couple things that are notable here. You know, first, is that it was an awfully big mistake. You do have to wonder, Holly, as you suggested, you know, how exactly does something like this happen? Right, this is a major and highly visible screw up of something at the very core of the Secretary of State's job. And you'd think that maybe they'd wanna get another set of eyes on that presidential ballot before sending it out, you know, a quick proof read. But that doesn't seem to have happened. And then second to your point, Sally, the reaction from Jacobson's office was just really off-key. The basic attitude they projected was, you know, like, what's wrong with all you hysterical people? You know, how dare you suggest there's an issue here? This after years of Republicans, as you note, obsessing over election integrity in ways that are occasionally veer off into kind of tin foil hat territory, right? I mean, this has been a big thing on the GOP side. And so, you know, you'd think that after such an embarrassing screw up that perhaps Jacobson would offer an apology and maybe even look to reassure the public that her office isn't totally incompetent rather than taking that line. But I guess not. - Holly, immigration and the border continue to be big issues in this election, especially in the congressional races. And here's a new ad from Ryan Zinke about his opponent, Monica Trinnell, in the Western District race. - Montana can't trust Monica Trinnell. On TV, she says she wants to secure the border, but behind closed doors. - If I'm down the border, it's not going to review. But if I'm not, right? - We need to not demonize and blame things. There won't actually fix anything. - Ryan Zinke voted for the strongest border security bill ever. Builds the wall and departs illegals. - Oh, I'm not sure what behind closed doors means in this ad because I moderated the very public candidates forum where Trinnell made these remarks. And the ad implies what she said at that forum contradicts what she's saying now about the border. - Yeah, Sally, this gets into a trinolad we talked about on a recent show where she's criticizing President Biden for not doing enough on the border and calling for a more secure southern border, more border agents and going after drug cartels. And that's a path we've seen Democrats need to take in this state to win in these state-wide congressional offices. We've seen similar discussions from Senator John Tester. But now the ad from Zinke is trying to counter that. And it is saying, like you said, behind closed doors, Trinnell is somehow seeing a different tune. And it is pulling comments from like you said, this very public forum, you moderated it. I wrote a story about it. I remember that was actually when there was an exchange where Trinnell actually grabbed the mic from Zinke at one point during that forum. But what Trinnell is saying in these clips is that closing the southern border is not going to reduce the fentanyl crisis. And I don't know if it really contradicts the recent statements on the border like Zinke is saying, it does here. What Trinnell is referencing is something we know from extensive reporting from multiple outlets, including NPR and CBS recently, that nearly all the fentanyl that comes in to the US from Mexico is actually coming through legal ports of entry and not being brought over by people who are either seeking asylum or crossing the border illegally. So unless it would also be closing those legal entry points, shutting down the border wouldn't actually be targeted at what's the real path for fentanyl into this country and eventually into Montana. But like you said, Sally, the southern border, as we've seen in poll after poll, is a major issue for Montana voters in this election. And we can also look at this NPR poll from 2022 that found that about 39% of people and 60% of Republicans and 38% of independents do believe that fentanyl in the country is being smuggled from people crossing the border illegally. So expect the Zinke ads going to hit well with a decent amount of people in this Western district. - Well, Rob, in the Senate race Republican challenger, Tim Sheehy, recently had South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem campaigning for him in Montana. And here's an excerpt of her message. All of you are going to save this country. I don't know if you realize how much people in other states are talking about Montana, an opportunity that you have. I came to talk to you today about the importance of your vote for the US Senate and what it means to have his back right now. - Noem has made headlines, Rob, in her home state for killing a pet dog. And she's been barred from several Native American reservations there over her policies. But she is popular with MAGA folks. - Yeah, she sure is, Sally. And for Sheehy, why not do an event with Noem? He's already gone very far in that direction. He may as well do an event with her, despite some of the baggage she carries. She's a star in that world. And I think part of the reason she's a star is because she does offend people on the other side of the political spectrum, right? I mean, that's a feature, not a bug, as they say. And I think all of this from Sheehy's perspective comes out of a very clear theory of the case for his campaign. And maybe this is just a shrewd political calculation. Maybe it's consistent with and a reflection of who Tim Sheehy is as a person, or maybe it's both of those things. But regardless, the key idea at work is that Trump is going to win Montana by a lot. It's going to be overwhelming, maybe as much as 20 points. So the only thing that Sheehy has to do is to get those people who are already voting for Trump to also vote for him. And he doesn't even need all of them. He can lose a substantial amount of them, and he's still okay. So if that's your starting point, the bigger thing to worry about from that perspective is getting on the wrong side of the mega people. That's a bigger concern than losing independence, or people who are horrified by Christie Nome. And I think we've seen that very consistently throughout the campaign, that Tim Sheehy is leaning into that. And not too concerned about winning over independence to say nothing, obviously, of trying to reach out to Democrats. - Holly, Tim Sheehy, according to a review by the Daily Montanen plagiarized parts of his memoir about aerial firefighting. What did they find? - Yeah, Sally. So the Daily Montanen reported that it ran passages of Sheehy's book, which is called "Mudslingers," a true story of aerial firefighting through software that's meant to detect plagiarism. And what it found is it flagged for passages as possibly problematic. One is linked to a source listed in the book's bibliography, but others weren't. And it also knows that there are no citations throughout the book, which makes it difficult to tell what isn't, isn't from other sources, or Sheehy's original work. Wikipedia is one of the sources that passages appeared to be from. So is the website wildfire today, and another one called Backseat Pilot, which is an aviation website, and that's the one that is cited in the book's source list. You neither Sheehy's campaign or the book's publisher return the outlets request for comment. Obviously, Democrats are running with this. We saw testers campaign very recently take out advertising on the websites of most newspapers in the state today to try to bring those to voters' attentions. Rob, the issue of plagiarism forced Democrat John Walsh to drop out of a Senate race 10 years ago when it was revealed he had plagiarized part of a college research paper. But this revelation about Sheehy doesn't seem to be having the same kind of consequence or traction. Yeah, that's right, Sally. And it is a remarkable change that we've seen just in this decade, right? We went from a clear cut case of plagiarism, forcing Walsh out of his Senate run at a very late date, I might add, to a plagiarism case that doesn't even compel a response from Sheehy, right? He's just going to ignore it, apparently. In a way, I think you can say that Walsh's plagiarism case was, at least in a sense, it was worse. For one thing, it was more extensive. For another, Walsh at the time was presenting himself to voters as a guy who fit into this kind of warrior-scholar model in which his graduate work at the Army War College really did loom large, right? That was a big part of the rationale for his candidacy. By contrast, Sheehy's candidacy isn't predicated really on his book in the same way. But that said, Sheehy clearly plagiarized parts of his book, and that is fundamentally dishonest. And in that sense, there is no difference between the two cases. You know, if a college freshman Sally submitted work like Sheehy did in his book, it would be a major problem. And of course, we should hold people who want to be US senators to a higher standard than we'd hold an 18-year-old. What's changed between the two cases is that our standards for what we expect out of our politicians is just plummeted. Obviously, an enormous amount of that can be traced directly to Donald Trump, and perhaps just as importantly, to elected Republicans who have, for years and years now, defended and enabled Trump's behavior. So that combination really has degraded the character of our whole system, and can, as it has in this instance, transform something that 10 years ago was a humiliating career-ender and make it into something that doesn't even necessitate a comment from Sheehy. Well, the airways are flooded with ads, and we have debates coming up. So these final campaign weeks are going to keep us really busy hauling, Rob. Thank you, and I'll talk to you again soon. Thanks, Sally. Thanks, Sally. [MUSIC PLAYING] You've been listening to Campaign Beat, a weekly political analysis program produced by Montana Public Radio. Campaign Beat features Rob Saldine of the University of Montana's Mansfield Center and Political Science Department, Lee newspaper, State News Bureau Chief Holly Michaels, and hosted by Sally Mock. Join us next week for more analysis of Montana politics. (upbeat music)