Election Integrity Project Contacts AG, SOS and County Attorney

The Missoula County Election Integrity Project has sent letters to three local and state officials with continuing concerns about the November, 2020 general election.

Attorney Quentin Rhoades, representing his client Montana legislator Brad Tschida referenced a nearly year-long investigation into the 2020 election.

“I want to address a couple of things that were said in the Missoulian today,” began Tschida. “That we’ve got county commissioners who hid when it was discovered that they were opening up a homeless shelter on U.S. 93 and wouldn’t even bother talking about it to the citizens and businesses. Now, they have the unmitigated gall to come out and talk about an ‘error-riddled hand count of election envelopes when hand counting, to anyone who does this, is found to be superior to a machine count. They also go on to say that our intention is to erode voter confidence, when the exact opposite is the case. We want to enhance voter confidence.”

Tschida provided information about The Election Integrity Project.

“The Election Integrity Project was started by a bunch of citizens that simply wanted to find out if there was integrity in the 2020 election,” he said. “When they counted all those affirmation envelopes, the envelopes that you sign when you put your ballot in the blue envelope and then the mail-in envelope, you have to sign it. They found out that there 4,592 of those ballots that were missing envelopes. So, those ballots should not have been counted.”

Tschida then referenced a document prepared for the project.

“We also discovered, if you look through that 52-page document, and I’ve gone through most of it, that the county had registered 72,533 votes counted and the SOS (Secretary of State’s) office had 42 fewer than that,” he said. “Yes, it’s only 42, but why the discrepancy? 42 people may have been denied the opportunity to have their votes count.”

Tschida said he has spoken to Montana Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen about the problems in Missoula.

“Her comments thus far have been ‘we need to do a better job going forward in determining and improving the integrity of elections,’” said Tschida. “There is a lack of confidence among people. If you look at the Rasmussen Poll that just came out, 56 percent of the people in the U.S., which includes a significant number of those who are on the Democratic side of the issue, believe that there was an issue with the 2020 election.”

Tschida said critics of such a stand accuse groups like The Missoula County Election Integrity Project of attempting to overturn the election.

“We’re not trying to overturn an election,” he said. “That’s is the farthest thing from our intentions. What we are attempting to do is to find out what caused all of the issues that we have discovered in the Missoula County Elections Office as it pertains to the ballots that came in. As we discover these issues and we bring them forward and the county says ‘take us to court’, that may become our only step going forward. That’s the last thing we want to do, Peter. I would much rather resolve this before we have to make it a legal matter.”

The letter states that ‘The Election Integrity Project consists exclusively of local volunteers, all who serve or have served on a pro bono publico basis.