Nearly All of Missoula’s Provisional Ballots Were Counted in Final Results

This week, November 13, workers at the Missoula Elections office wrapped up the counting of thousands of provisional ballots that had been set aside during the election. Missoula County Elections Coordinator Dayna Causby explains why…

“The provisional ballot is for someone who has maybe a name and address change or they are moving county to county or precinct to precinct, so kind of an unreported move, as well as not providing an ID," Causby said. "We actually take all of those ballots. We received approximately 2,300 provisional ballots.”

Nearly all of those 2,300 ballots were accepted and the votes were tallied, but about 80 had to be rejected for various reasons.

“Every one of those got processed, researched or worked through by one of the election officials here,” Causby said. “Every one of those voters were either accepted if there was any way to accept them. We actually had a 96.6 percentage acceptance rate on our provisionals and then the 3.5 percent that didn’t maybe their security number didn’t verify or there were other issues. That majority of them had their absentee ballots already sent to them, county to county moves and precinct to precinct move.”

This week the elections office will audit some of the precincts, check the state of the voting machines and prepare for the official canvassing of the results which will occur next Tuesday, before the County Commissioners.