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Montana bill would shift school-election filing and certification windows to ease ballot printing
Summary
House Bill 406 would standardize and extend filing and ballot-certification deadlines for school trustee and special-district elections; election officials and the Office of Public Instruction backed a friendly amendment moving a 37-day certification deadline to 40 days to avoid weekend cutoffs and give printers an extra business day.
Representative Fiona Nave on Friday opened House Bill 406, which she described as a technical cleanup requested by the Office of Public Instruction and county clerks and recorders to align filing and certification timelines for school and special-district elections.
Nicole Thuot, an election specialist and education data manager at the Office of Public Instruction, told the committee the bill shifts candidate filing windows to “145 days before to 85 days before” for regular candidates and aligns write-in deadlines so filings occur when schools are in session. “That allows time to make sure we have the right trustees, the right candidates, the right positions and the right boundaries before filing opens,” Thuot said.
County election officials urged passage, saying the extra days relieve pressure in the ballot-proofing and printing process. “Buying this extra time for us … gives us a chance to go, ‘wait a minute, printer, you did this wrong,’ ” said Connor Fitzpatrick, elections division supervisor for Lewis and Clark County. He said the changes will ease the rush that sometimes follows school-election certification and the separate timeline for federal primaries.
Clerks and recorders association leaders and local election administrators echoed that view, citing the need to work with the statewide ballot vendor ES&S and to send proofs to printers without last-minute changes. Eric Semerad, president of the Montana Clerk and Recorders Association, told lawmakers that in larger counties the proof-and-print cycle can take several days to a week, and standardizing deadlines “helps out both the schools and the election administrators.”
Representative Nave noted a clerks-and-recorders amendment on the final page that would change a 37-day statutory deadline to 40 days for ballot certification; Thuot explained to the committee that 37 can fall on a weekend while 40 falls on a Thursday, giving counties an additional business day to transmit final ballot data to printers and to meet tabulator software deadlines.
There were no opponents in the room or online; committee members asked technical and implementation questions about matching statutory language and whether school boards supported the changes. Thuot said MASBO and the Montana School Boards Association raised no objections.
The committee closed the hearing on HB406 after Representative Nave’s closing remarks and confirmed the distributed amendment would be considered by the committee.
