County GOP pays for envelope count to disprove voter fraud

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — A Montana county Republican organization paid to have election officials recount signature envelopes from the November 2020 election in an attempt to alleviate voter concerns after a private group claimed its own count found nearly 4,600 more votes than envelopes in the election held by mail because of the pandemic.

“I would tell voters that they can be absolutely 100% confident that their vote counts and will be counted,” Vondene Kopetski, chair of the Missoula County Republican Central Committee, said Tuesday after the count wrapped up.

The result of this week’s envelope count was 71 different from the nearly 72,500 votes cast in Missoula County in November 2020, said Elections Administrator Bradley Seaman.

The margin of error was 0.09% compared with 6% in the January 2021 count performed by the Montana Election Integrity Project.

“What this all boils down to is that Montana’s elections are safe and secure,” Seaman said. If there had been an error involving 4,600 votes, it would have been caught by the canvas board, the Secretary of State’s Office and a post-election equipment audit, he said.

And if the results were off so badly, the Montana Election Integrity Project — which did the first envelope count — should have challenged them in court, Seaman said.

“Choosing not to take it to court shows to me that there was no merit behind these allegations originally and it took an intraparty conflict of the Republican Central Committee to show what a poor job they had done,” Seaman said.

“If this is a political game, the stakes that they’re playing with are people’s confidence in elections — and that’s not something that should be taken lightly,” Seaman said.

The Montana voter fraud claim, and the county party's effort to disprove it, is an example...