- [Sam] Coming up on "Impact", Montana tops the nation in the number of Senate ads with more than 93,000 airings since September 1st.

- [Dr. Travis] I think, for the average voter, they feel inundated by these political messages.

- [Sam] We'll talk money and politics with the co-director of the National Wesleyan Media Project.

Plus, we'll meet the Montanans responsible for carrying out the state's election in a fair and accurate manner.

- [Eric] Definitely adds a lot of labor and labor costs to have those processes followed.

- [Sam] Those stories, next on "Impact".

- [Announcer] Production of "Impact" is made possible with support from the Greater Montana Foundation, encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans, and viewers like you who are friends of Montana PBS.

Thank you.

- Welcome to "Impact".

I'm Sam Wilson.

You may be sick of seeing these in your mailbox.

This is the stack I've received recently, and Montanans have also endured nearly 40,000 broadcast ads from the Senate race in the last two weeks alone.

Critics say the US Supreme Court's Citizen United decision from 2010 is squarely to blame.

That decision effectively opened the gates on election spending, and since then, money in politics has skyrocketed.

Montana PBS's Anna Rau sat down with Dr. Travis Ridout, co-director of the ad tracking group Wesleyan Media Project to discuss the impact of all that money.

- Do you think that Citizens United has changed elections quite a bit?

- It has.

It's just made it really easy to get large sums of money into politics.

Prior to that time, the only way to get a bunch of money into politics was through nonprofits who were limited in how much they could spend on politics.

They were limited in electioneering.

They kind of had to pretend that they weren't telling you to vote for someone, and so they'd say nice things about one candidate or, more generally, nasty things about one candidate, but it was all done kind of on the side to make sure that they weren't engaging in what would clearly be electioneering.

And so, with Citizens United, that was all opened up.

You could say, "Vote for so and so."

We didn't have to worry about any of those, kind of, making sure we were following the law anymore because the law had really changed.

You could raise as much money as you wanted, you could spend as much money as you wanted.

- Does that have to be reported somewhere though?

Is there a way to track that?

- With a super PAC, yes.

That has to be reported to the Federal Election Commission, but some people don't like that.

If I'm a billionaire, and I don't want people to know that I'm spending 50 million of my hard earned money on trying to influence a campaign, there are other avenues, though, that could be spent through or contributed to, a 501(c) nonprofit who do not have to disclose who their donors are.

- Those are the dark money groups.

- [Dr. Travis] Those are the dark money groups.

Exactly.

Many organizations or people involved in politics might have a super PAC or two, A 501(c) or two.

Sometimes they're donating to each other.

You'll see, maybe they're using, for one part of the campaign, It might be more advantageous to spend that money through the super PAC.

Another part of the campaign will spend the money through the 501(c), so you can even have these very vast networks of, you know, 50 different legal entities.

Many of 'em might have the same address.

There's not really anyone behind them, but they're giving money to each other and spending that money for electioneering.

- So kind of funneling it through different businesses to hide where it's coming from?

- Exactly, yes.

And also with the 501(c)s, technically I'm not supposed to spend more than half of my money on politics, but if I donate half of my money to another group and then spend the other half on politics, then I guess I'm abiding by the rule of the law in that instance.

Of course, that group I'm donating it to is going to spend that money on politics, oftentimes negative political ads.

- And you see that going on?

- Oh, we see that going on a lot.

Yes.

- Wow.

And that's all totally legal?

- All totally legal, yes.

- [Anna] What is the practical effect of that for voters at home?

What effect does that have on how they experience the election?

- So, I think, for the average voter, they feel inundated by these political messages, especially if you're living in a state with a really competitive senate race.

- I'm Jon Tester, and I approve this message.

- I'm Tim Sheehy, and I approve this message.

- [Dr.Travis] Montana has seen a lot of ads.

Montana always seems to be in our top five, if not top three in terms of the number of ads, and also is high in terms of spending.

And there are a few reasons for that.

One is that TV advertising is relatively cheap in Montana.

The media markets are small.

In fact, Montana has the smallest media market in the country, in Glendive.

And so, these outside groups can come in and spend a lot of money, and buy a lot of advertising inventory with that.

You know, Montana is also geographically big, so you have to buy ads on a lot of different TV stations in order to reach the entire state.

Montana is also unique in some ways in that people are used to driving long distances, and so, radio is more of a player in Montana than some other states.

- Does it follow that a politician who knows this particular company or this particular industry gave a bunch to their election campaign or their reelection campaign, does it follow that that politician then will do the bidding of said company or corporation, or is that not necessarily a fair connection to make?

- It's probably not a fair connection to make in most cases.

What we do know is that money buys access, though.

If I'm a member of Congress, I know that a company, a business, an industry, a labor union has been very supportive of me in the past and I want their support in the future, when they come calling and say, "Hey, we need to talk about this," I say, "Yes, I have time to schedule with you.

Definitely.

I will talk about that."

And ultimately, members of Congress are supposed to listen to all of their constituents.

That includes, you know, big business as well.

You just hope that that access is equal for me as it is for the big oil company that contributes $2 million.

- I think that was a big concern when Citizens United passed, is that all of these wealthy donors would have more sway, would have more influence than your everyday American.

- Yeah, and there's pretty good research in political science showing that's the case.

Politicians are more responsive to the views of the wealthy than the people who are in the middle class or the lower class in our country, and that's lots of good evidence on that in political science.

Hard to deny.

- What do you think all this money is doing to democracy?

Do you think it's having an effect on our democracy?

- Oh, I think it is.

Yeah.

You know, even members of Congress complain that they have to spend so much time raising money that they'd rather not be doing.

They'd probably rather be back in the district, talking to people.

Sometimes good policy suffers.

Sometimes, you know, Democrats and Republicans secretly would like to compromise on something, but they fear to do so because they might get attacked by $10 million in negative advertising and being a sellout.

- Do you think it's polarized politicians more, potentially?

- I do believe it has.

Yeah.

Members of Congress are worried about being primaried, you know, by someone further from the left or further from the right, points out that, you know, they were in the mushy middle, or they dared compromise with someone from the other party.

And so, that can have a negative influence and really bring more polarization to Congress, and the more polarization we see in Congress, that can trickle down to voters who align with those parties as well.

- What would you do if you could be the decider with elections?

- You know, I don't think that all election spending is bad by any means.

That's the way that, you know, voters can learn about the candidates, and again, there's pretty good evidence that voters can actually learn truthful things.

I can learn from those political ads, who's more to the left and who's more to the right and find someone who aligns with my own views.

And so, that can be helpful.

The flaw I see, again, is in that lack of transparency.

If I were king for the day, I would require much more transparency in the process, first and foremost.

- Are there loopholes that you see for reporting and transparency?

- The real blind spot right now is with digital advertising.

With online advertising, there are very few reporting requirements.

Some of the major platforms like Meta and Google do have their own requirements, but they could take those away tomorrow if they wanted, and there are a lot of online ads that are being placed on third party sites, and so, honestly, we don't even know exactly how much is being spent on online ads.

- Why is it important for people to understand who's spending money and how much is being spent in our elections?

- When you know who's spending that money, you know what their motives are in trying to influence you to vote in a particular way, and that allows you to take the message with a big grain of salt.

There's research showing that, if we know that money's coming from instate versus out of state, for instance, that matters for how voters interpret those messages and how receptive they are to those messages.

If you know that message is coming from an environmental group versus an oil company, that's going to influence your thinking as well.

I think it also helps with accountability.

If we know who's responsible for this message that may be not quite truthful, when we're reporting on that, that might make that group or that candidate decide, "I need to be a little less loose with the truth in the future."

- It's important to note that because political ads are considered free speech and protected by the First Amendment, local stations cannot refuse to air ads from candidates, even if they are false or inaccurate.

However, news organizations do have some discretion when considering ads from outside groups.

All that money surging into politics only adds to a growing distrust of the election process in Montana, which has inspired new ballot counting procedures in counties statewide.

Montana PBS's Hannah Kearse reports on how local election officials are working with citizens to ensure a fair and accurate election.

- [Hannah] Processing votes in Montana's general elections is more complex and resource-intensive than ever before.

Part of this is due to rising doubts about election integrity.

In response, county election offices, alongside the state legislature, have implemented new procedures aimed to strengthen voter confidence in Montana's elections.

This includes a new law that requires counties to continuously count ballots until every legal vote is tallied.

- We're doing something new this year.

The Secretary of State offered grants for a program to assist with that late night counting, knowing that we have this law.

And so, we applied for that grant and receive monies to hire people specific to do just that job, come in at 10 or midnight on election night and work through the night to keep the process going.

And we appreciate that the effort's made, but it's also very difficult to hire those people.

- [Hannah] Gallatin County saw this law in action for the first time in this year's primary election, which involved just over 29,000 ballots.

- [Eric] You know, we get here usually between five and 6:00 AM on election day, work all the way through election day, through election night, and this last election, we got done, I think my manager and I got outta here a little after 10 o'clock Wednesday night without a wink of sleep.

It's long.

- [Hannah] And primary elections don't have the kind of voter turnout that general elections do.

If Gallatin County sees the same percentage of voter turnout as it did in the 2020 general election, it can expect the number of casted ballots to almost double that of this year's primaries.

The continuous count bill creates a new challenge, especially for the state's larger counties like Gallatin and Yellowstone.

- Everything that we can count, we're supposed to continue counting.

We can't stop if we're tired, we just have to keep going so we can get those results out to the public.

And so, planning administratively for that and trying to find people that able to work those late hours, because it's not just people are willing to do it.

A lot of people are willing, but are they awake?

Are they able to do really focused, detailed work on a timeline when they may not usually be awake?

- [Hannah] Previously, election offices were allowed to take a break to get some sleep and finish the count the following morning.

But the legislature saw this as an unnecessary delay for election results, citing that the longer the public must wait, the less confident they are in the election results.

No evidence has been produced to indicate that Montana's election results are fraudulent, but the belief that Montana's elections aren't secure has initiated changes in the state's elections process.

County election offices are the boots on the ground when it comes to Montana's elections.

It's where the bulk of the state's election procedures are carried out, and counties can implement their own procedures to satisfy their county needs.

Now, administrators are also addressing their county's concerns of election integrity.

- It's extremely time consuming and labor intensive.

It definitely adds a lot of labor and labor costs to have those processes followed, but it's really important to be able to show, hey, we issued this many ballots and we received this many ballots back, and we counted this many ballots, and these numbers should match up.

- [Hannah] This is the basis for Montana's reconciliation process of ballots, which tracks casted ballots from the voter's hands to the final count, and it's just one safeguard in a series of security measures.

- And there's so much paperwork.

It's not just the reconciliations that are following the ballots, but we have logs for almost everything we touch.

We have logs, now, for ballots.

Also, all of our election equipment, every single piece of equipment has its own log sheet.

Every time you turn on a tabulator, you log in to this that shows that you accessed the tabulator, our express votes machines, our Electionware computer, all these things are tracked every single step of the way.

- [Hannah] This is among the ways that counties are increasing accountability for election workers involved in the process.

- [Ginger] One of the things Yellowstone County implemented this year was transport teams of two.

We try to have bipartisan teams doing everything so there's good accountability.

And one of the other things that we have implemented this election cycle is we have paperwork that travels the ballots after they're checked into the computer system.

That is a style that we adopted from some other big counties on the western part of the state.

They started implementing that a few years ago, and we like that.

We think it provides more accountability, it provides us with better information for our canvas board.

- [Hannah] With a growing population and number of election procedures in Montana, most counties had to increase its number of election judges for this year's general election.

Here in the Gallatin County Courthouse, election judges undergo the legally required training.

In this upcoming election, about 400 election judges will serve Gallatin county's 46 precincts.

And in Yellowstone County, the community also rose to the occasion with another 400 plus trained election judges ready to serve Montanans.

- The community has been incredible.

I mean, our election judges are our lifeblood, and the community has really responded when we put out the call, so we're really proud of our citizens in Yellowstone County.

- [Hannah] Montana's election process depends on the coordinated effort of election judges and administrators in every county, and although there is no evidence of large scale voter fraud the likes of those alleged in the 2020 election, voter fraud does happen.

Even in Montana, a fraud conviction came out of Bozeman in 2021, and that's why the verification and reconciliation processes are so tedious.

- I used to be an attorney at the legislature, and I used to write election laws for legislators, and the first time I looked at the election law in terms of the signature verification process, I thought to myself, "There's no way that they can check this many thousands of signatures," and then we were invited to Lewis and Clark and we went over to see their processes, and I saw them check every single signature, and that was my baptism to elections, and I was so impressed with how much time and effort election offices has put in to make sure that you are the person who is sending back your ballot.

- [Hannah] Another feature of the election process is that it's open for the public to observe in a way that protects voting privacy, but in this general election, Montana will also have trained observers watching.

Gallatin and Yellowstone counties are two of the 15 counties participating in the Montana Election Observation Initiative.

This Montana-driven initiative is assessing how well counties are carrying out Montana's voting laws.

- I already feel good about having poll watchers from both parties, so essentially, both sides are already doing that process.

And, you know, we have a good relationship with both those parties working in this office, so I'm already pretty confident in that, at least for Gallatin County, but it can't hurt, right?

They're nonpartisan, and just seeing things objectively, I think that's a good thing.

- [Hannah] The Carter County and University of Montana's Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center partnered to fund and facilitate this initiative, but Montanans are responsible for the groundwork.

- If we can shine a light and people can see that we're just an average citizen observing our election systems and how transparent it is to every citizen, that it will rebuild the trust some people have lost in our election system.

That's my hope.

- And one thing that I learned today that I thought was really interesting was how involved the process is.

- Yes.

- Every, every single step of the way, care is taken to ensure that people have a private vote, to ensure that their vote gets counted, to ensure that everything is done by the book.

- Right.

I agree.

- [Hannah] One reason Montana was a candidate for this initiative is because it allows non-partisan election observation, which many states don't, but the recent shift in election confidence across the nation was a big driver for this kind of work.

- You know who's running our elections?

Your neighbor, your friend, the person you voted for in the previous election.

You see the same people, and that hasn't changed.

The laws have changed, some for the better, maybe some for the worse, but it hasn't affected the way we operate elections.

We're hoping that, through what we're doing, because you learn all about Montana law in Montana elections, and when you sit through and watch an election process for hours, you start seeing what your neighbors, what your friends, what your relatives, what those volunteers are doing based on what the law is, and you can follow along, and it starts to make sense.

- [Hannah] With the former Secretary of State and legislatures from across the aisle on the board, The MTEOI is tasking Montanans to observe key parts of the election process.

In addition to gaining skills for non-partisan and fact-based election observation, participants also learn about Montana's voting laws, and the hope is that it all contributes to stronger voter confidence in communities across the state.

If you're heading to the polls in one of the 15 counties that the initiative is observing, you may see some of it underway, but you don't need a trained eye to observe Montana's election process in action.

The initiative is observing a public process.

Every step of the way is open to the public, and you may be surprised what you learn.

- For me, it was how each ballot is tracked, and, I mean, ballots come and they're sealed, and you have to verify, with two judge signatures, two election judge signatures, that everything has come in the proper manner.

Every time the ballots move along the process, judges sign, they move them along.

It's very impressive.

And the secrecy, they really work hard to preserve each voter's secret ballot.

- [Hannah] For "Impact," I'm Hannah Kearse.

- Whether you vote in person or absentee, ballots must be received at county election offices by 8:00 PM on Tuesday, November 5th.

You can then track your ballot using the voter portal on the Secretary of State's website.

From all of us here at "Impact", thanks for watching.

I'm Sam Wilson, and we'll see you next time.

(soft pensive music) (pensive music continues) - [Announcer] Production of "Impact" is made possible with support from the Greater Montana Foundation, encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans, and viewers like you who are friends of Montana PBS.

Thank you.

(soft piano playing)