Viewpoint: Another attempt by AG to mislead voters

Dean McGovern

Montanans have long supported our nonpartisan courts. This support cuts across party, across generations, and across the state. Public polling has consistently shown that 65 percent of Montanans want to keep partisanship out of judicial elections.

But for several years now, our right to judicial elections free from political party influence has been under attack. MontPIRG, which has been fighting to protect the rights of Montana voters since 1981, has stood up to these attempts by the legislature to turn our judicial elections partisan. That’s why we joined the growing coalition behind Montanans for Nonpartisan Courts (MNC) and their ballot measure to protect nonpartisan judicial elections.

With decades of fighting for fair elections under our belt, we’ve seen Attorneys General of both parties, Republican and Democratic, make fair, unbiased decisions about ballot initiatives. That’s why we are troubled to see the misleading ballot summary language that was just issued by Attorney General Knudsen. This follows a troubling trend over the past five years, with the Attorney General using his role to leverage political power and kill any initiative he doesn’t like.

It’s clear this is another attempt to kill an initiative by misleading voters. Numbers tell the story best: polling MNC conducted in July on early drafts of the proposal that became CI-132 confirmed that the simple, straightforward policy language submitted by Montanans for Nonpartisan Courts was just as popular as other past polling on the issue. 64 percent of a representative sample of voters in Montana said they planned to vote yes on the ballot measure as submitted. This is consistent with January polling that found 65 percent of voters support nonpartisan judicial elections.

When voters are instead shown the rewritten, confusing and misleading summary language crafted by the Attorney General, support plummets and the initiative fails. Our coalition recently poll tested the Attorney General’s misleading ballot statement rewrite to see just how confused voters would be if that’s what they saw on their ballots. When shown the AG’s summary, support sinks to only 45 percent. This huge drop in support is not surprising, since the AG appears to have crafted language designed to mislead and deceive voters.

The public deserves to vote on this important initiative, and they deserve to have fair ballot language presented to them when they do. Ballot statements exist to empower people to make intelligent, informed choices. We hope that the citizens of Montana will see through the gamesmanship and join us in demanding fairness in our initiative process and our elections.

Dean McGovern is the executive director of MontPIRG