Montana

Montana has no party registration. MCA 13-2-110 enumerates everything a voter registration application must carry — date of birth, and a Montana driver's licence number, state ID number or the last four of a social security number, with an alternative photo-ID route — and party is not among them. Party exists one layer up: the candidate portal lets a person file as a member of a qualified party, as a minor party candidate, as a candidate independent of party affiliation, or for a non-partisan office, and the filing system carries DEM, REP, LIB, IND, MP and NON. Any pipeline that derives primary eligibility from a voter's enrolment, or reports registration split by party, has nothing to read here.

Daniels, Fallon, Garfield, Golden Valley, McCone, Meagher, Powder River, Prairie and Treasure hand-count paper ballots. There is no tabulator export, no scanner log and no machine timestamp to key on, so any ingest that waits for a machine tally waits forever in nine counties, and any freshness metric derived from tabulator output scores them permanently stale.

All 47 counties that tabulate by machine run ES&S equipment — DS200, DS300, DS450, DS850, DS950 and one Model 450 in Fergus. Not one county in the state uses any other manufacturer. A model that treats equipment vendor as a differentiator finds no variance in Montana, and a single vendor advisory or certification change is a statewide event rather than a county one.

Under MCA 13-2-110(6) an applicant whose information is sufficient and verified is registered as a <b>legally registered elector</b>; one whose application was accepted but whose identifying information was missing, incorrect or unverifiable is registered as a <b>provisionally registered elector</b>. Both are registrations. A boolean registered flag collapses the two and silently promotes provisional registrants, which is the population most likely to be challenged at the polls.

The Secretary of State's official results page publishes a <b>County by County</b> link for the 2026 primary pointing at <code>electionresults.mt.gov/ResultsList.aspx</code>. Read on August 14, 2026 that URL returned the results landing page itself — byte-identical to <code>sosmt.gov/elections/results/</code> — rather than any county result. A nonexistent path on the same host returned a 254-byte error, so the host is not a catch-all and the rewrite is specific to the published link. Certified county detail is reachable only through the precinct-by-precinct and canvass documents.

The voting systems table writes <b>Lewis and Clark</b>; the election administrator directory writes <b>Lewis &amp; Clark</b>. Both are published by the Secretary of State, both carry exactly 56 rows, and a straight name join matches 55 of them. The county that drops out contains Helena.

As published on August 14, 2026, the issues qualified for the 2026 general election ballot are listed as <b>TBD</b> — none. Eight are approved to gather signatures (CI-129, CI-130, CI-131, CI-132, CI-133, CI-134, CI-135 and I-194), two are submitted and forwarded to Legislative Services, and two were found legally insufficient by the Attorney General. Thresholds are steep and geographic: 5% of qualified voters including 5% in each of 34 legislative house districts for an initiative or referendum, 10% including 10% in each of 40 districts for a constitutional initiative. A ballot inventory built before qualification closes is not a ballot.

The state's voter help centre carries a live notice that a court order prohibits Montana election officials from implementing Senate Bill 490, which had provided statewide voter registration and voting in all 56 counties. Registration and voting rules on the books are therefore not the rules in force, and a deadline model built from statute alone is wrong.