The following is a transcribed version of Yellowstone County poll watcher Skyler Kincaid’s public comment during the Yellowstone County Commissioners meeting on November 21st. In his statement, Kincaid summarizes his concerns about irregularities in the tabulation of election results and inconsistencies with the public comments made to the Montana media regarding the reason for result reporting delays given by Deputy County Attorney and Interim Election Administrator Kevin Gillen.

My name is Skyler Kincaid and I live in Yellowstone County.

Peggy Miller and I monitored and learned additional information about the entire vote counting process at the courthouse from Tuesday, November 8th at 7:00 AM until 1:30 AM in the morning on Wednesday, November 9th.

I have three concerns:

1. The first one is the lack of transparency with the voting machine electronic logs and real-time DOT matrix printed logs. These logs should be uploaded to the county website along with the official election results. They should not be boxed up with the ballots and hidden from the public, behind a court order and attorney fees. I know this is the case because I did a public records request for the same logs for the previous school board election and was denied.
2. My next concern is:
   • The lack of care with the chain of custody of the ballots. Ballots were moved from the 1st floor opening room to the 2nd floor counting room via the elevator, multiple times, in open USPS bins.
   • Also, when the ballots were being checked in from the remote precincts the process was incomplete. At one point, they accidentally brought up 12 metal boxes to the counting room that hadn’t been processed yet. They contained blank ballots, voting information books and voted ballots. The locks were cut and thrown into the bag with all the other lock tags. Yellowstone County Interim Election Administrator Kevin Gillen took the entire bag of cut locks and said he would figure out which locks were on them and get them checked in downstairs. He said, “What I am going to do is pull the stuff that aren’t, that isn’t voted ballots out and then run these back up”.
3. My final concern is a news article where Kevin stated that the reason for not releasing numbers at 8:00 PM was due to the weather. The weather had nothing to do with the delay. The initial results that were released only contained numbers before 4:30PM when dinner started because no ballots were counted between 4:30 PM and 8:30 PM when they exported the initial results from the machine. This 8:30 PM export was used for the initial release of numbers even though they counted ballots from other precincts between the initial 8:30 PM export and releasing the initial numbers at 11:40 PM to the news media.

Quick timeline summary:

• 4:30 PM – The dinner break starts and ballot counting stops. All the ballots in the courthouse appeared to be counted and they were only waiting on the remote precincts, but voting didn’t end for those until every person in line at 8:00PM was able to vote. Most of the counting and processing staff at the courthouse left for the night.
• 8:30 PM – Yellowstone County Elections Administrator Ginger Aldrich starts attempting to run the consolidated report from the machines. Instead of quickly getting the data exported from the machines, Ginger and the ES&S voting machine technician used this as a time to teach Ginger how to do it. 30 minutes after the preliminary results were supposed to be available to the public.
• 9:15 PM – Ballot counting started again but they were done after about 30 minutes with all of the ballots that were available. The ES&S technician named “Jared” remotely, via cell phone, because the report on the offline ES&S machine that consolidates the numbers needs updated for this election. They find out that they need the registered voters per precinct numbers to enter the report, so it shows the percentage reported. They initially decide to try and hide this from the report since it is unofficial results but then realize they need those numbers for the secretary of states website and their upload requirements. They begin trying to get those numbers.
• 10:30 PM – An “IT guy” who appeared to be Yellowstone County employee was able to run the registered voters per precinct report and save it to Sharepoint. They print off the numbers and run upstairs. They verbally read off the numbers to the ES&S voting machine technician but one of the precincts wasn’t split correctly like they needed so they attempt to contact the “IT guy” again to split the precinct.
• 11:40 PM – Ginger finally gets the numbers required for the voters per precinct, prints off a couple copies of the results and they head downstairs. At this point, KTVQ is updating their website with results before any results are posted to our county website which didn’t happen until 1 AM Wednesday morning.

This timeline shows that the weather had nothing to do with the results being extremely delayed. Lack of process documentation and testing prior to the election was the cause of the delay.

I request that the certification of the election be delayed until we can make copies of electronic and dot-matrix machines logs available to the public for review.