Big Sky Times

According to the Missoula Current, the Montana Secretary of State’s Office reported that close to 400,000 mail-in ballots already have been returned with less than a week before the Nov. 3 election.

County officials had accepted 389,942 ballots by Tuesday out of 637,860 sent to voters, the story said.

The state's seven largest counties: Yellowstone, Missoula, Gallatin, Flathead, Cascade, Lewis and Clark and Ravalli represented the majority of the ballots returned so far, the Current reported. The percentage of Montana voters choosing to vote absentee has been going up for years, and reached 78% in 2018.

“What happens is, instead of one Election Day, we have multiple Election Days,” David Parker, head of Montana State University’s Department of Political Science, told the Current.

That means that in the final days of the election, traditional ads produce diminishing returns because so many have already voted and the campaigns know who still has ballots outstanding, Parker said.

“Now campaigns have to shift their resources in ways that are less blunt and ways that are more targeted, specifically those voters that they know have not returned their ballots yet,” he said.

Election officials will tell the campaigns which voters have yet to return their ballots, and those voters can be targeted with direct-mail fliers, texting and other advertising methods, Parker said.

If the 2020 turnout is as high at it was in 2016, at 71%, that would a total of 520,000 votes, the story said.

In Montana’s June primary, which was conducted exclusively by mail because of COVID-19, voters returned more than 60% of the ballots mailed out. It was the highest primary turnout since 1972, the Current reported.