UPDATE Thursday 9:16 a.m.
Yellowstone County Election Administrator Dayna Causby said Thursday morning the number of ballots tabulated Monday will be under 200, but could not provide a more specific number.
She said the office resolved 33 ballots on Wednesday by 5 p.m., resulting in a final rejection rate of 2.08%.
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First Report
BILLINGS— The rejection rate for Yellowstone County ballots dropped to 2.28 percent the day after the election, although that rate remains nearly the triple the size of last year.
The election office worked until 5 p.m. Wednesday resolving ballots. By that time, they had resolved 678 ballots, which will be tabulated Monday at 3 p.m.
Yellowstone County Election Administrator Dayna Causby said the usual ballot rejection rate is 0.75 percent. This year, more ballots have been rejected due to a new state law requiring voters to write their birth year on the outside.
Elections officials have flagged those ballots and allowed votes to true those ballots through Wednesday, so the rejection rate has fallen over the past week. Initially 1,400 ballots were flagged, and that number has fallen to about 700.
Watch to see why the rejection rate went up:
Related: More than 700 votes rejected in Yellowstone County due to a lack of birth year
“Our team has worked really hard to contact every single voter. If we could find any bit of contact information for a voter, we did our best to contact them and let them know that they had a rejected ballot and what the steps were that they could follow to resolve that issue,” she said.
Causby explained 80% of the rejected ballots were rejected due to voters not including their birth year on the absentee ballot, which became a requirement due to a Montana law that went into effect on Oct. 1.
“The majority of our voters who've come in after we have called them about the rejected status of their ballot have said, ‘I just didn't see it. "I didn't know, I didn't see it.’ They have a lot of good company across Yellowstone County and across the state of people who also didn't see that on their ballot,” said Causby.
“There are some races that are very close. The Billings mayoral race, the Laurel mayoral race (is) also very close, so those rejected ballots will have an impact,” said Causby.
Canvassing of votes will be completed Nov. 18, which will make the results official.
To check your mail-in ballot’s status, you can log in to My Voter page.
