After county election officials processed another 16,000 signatures from inactive Montana voters this week as ordered by a district court in Helena, proponents of three ballot initiatives said Wednesday they had easily surpassed the signature thresholds necessary to make the ballot in November.
Counties had until noon Wednesday to finish counting the thousands of additional signatures, which a judge said last week should not have been tossed out when an attorney for Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen told counties in the middle of the signature verification process they should not count.
Lewis and Clark District Court Judge Mike Menahan issued a temporary restraining order barring Jacobsen and her office from acting on that legal interpretation and ordered the signatures from inactive voters to be restored.
Montanans for Election Reform and Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights, the two groups behind the three initiatives, had said last Friday they had already met the necessary number of signatures in total and the requirement to get signatures from 10% of voters in at least 40 state House districts.
The two initiative campaigns said Wednesday afternoon they had bolstered their numbers.
Montanans for Election Reform, the group behind Constitutional Initiatives 126 and 127, said 70,956 signatures had been verified for CI-126 and 69,172 were verified for CI-127.
CI-126 gathered at least 604 signatures in 54 House districts, while CI-127 did so in 52 districts. Those two initiatives propose a top-four political candidate model and would require a candidate win with a majority vote and not simply a plurality.
Frank Garner, one of the board members for Montanans for Election Reform, said the group was thankful the courts sided with the groups so far and for the county election workers.
“Thank you again to every county elections worker who went above and beyond the process these signatures representing the will of Montana voters,” he said in a written statement.
Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights said it had 81,163 signatures validated as of Wednesday afternoon and had met the signature requirements in 59 different House districts – surpassing their required signature total by more than 20,000.
“We’re excited to have met the valid signature threshold and the House District threshold required to qualify this critical initiative for the ballot,” said MSRR spokesperson Kiersten Iwai, also the executive director of Forward Montana. “Still, we will not stop fighting to ensure that every Montana voter who signed the petition has their signature counted.”
CI-128 would enshrine abortion access in the state constitution and prohibit the government from interfering with the right to travel for medical assistance and protect abortion practitioners.
The two groups and Jacobsen’s office will be back in district court on Friday for a preliminary injunction hearing on the matter after the Montana Supreme Court on Tuesday unanimously declined to take control of the case from Menahan.
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