General Election Information from Administrator Bradley Seaman

KGVO is beginning a series of stories on this website, as well as on the Montana Morning news show featuring Missoula County Elections Administrator Bradley Seaman.

Seaman appeared on the Talk Back show recently to speak with listeners who jammed the phone lines with questions about the upcoming all-mail ballot election, the first ever national general election to held exclusively through the mail.

The first question phoned in by a caller referenced how a voter might be dropped from the rolls.

You can go to www.myvoterpagemt.com, and you can check your registration status as well as your ballot status,” he said. “So with this election, everybody's going to get a ballot mailed on October 9.

“If you missed a federal election, we're going to follow back up with you the following year,” began Seaman. “We're going to reach out to you and say you didn't vote in this upcoming federal election. Are you still here? Are you still active? Because it's certainly welcome for you not to vote in that election. But we want to reach out to say, are you still here? If we have two mailings that go out, and neither of those come back, we then put you in a state called inactive. So you're not actually a canceled voter. You're still on the voter rolls but you're not automatically mailed a ballot in an election in an election like this one.”

Seaman related the information his office receives regarding voters who have died between elections.

“In Montana, we get quarterly reports from the Department of Health and Human Services of anybody who has died inside Montana or a resident of Montana who's passed away,” he said. “We also track our obituaries to remove those voters from the rolls. But what would happen is, if they didn't vote in a federal election, we'd send those mailings and they'd come back as undeliverable and we'd go through a process to move them to inactive, and then after six years of being inactive, we would cancel those voters.”

Seaman provided a website for any voter in Montana to check their status.

“You can go to www.myvoterpagemt.com, and you can check your registration status as well as your ballot status,” he said. “So with this election, everybody's going to get a ballot mailed on October 9. And if you get that and vote that right away and mail it back into us, so as soon as they go out, you can check the address that it was sent to. And then when you've mailed it back in, we'd work very hard to make sure that every ballot we've received that day gets recorded. So the next day it shows up on that database.”

Each day KGVO will provide another topic covered by Seaman during the Talk Back interview. Listen to the full podcast with Bradley Seaman here.

Keep Reading..