Did Montana leave Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris off the 2024 ballot, as social media posts claim? That lacks some context: Harris has been a registered candidate in Montana for U.S. president since August 2024, according to state records. Montana's Electronic Absentee System, which can be used by Montana-registered military and civilian voters abroad, initially omitted Harris' name from its absentee ballot. But the Montana secretary of state's office reported that it corrected the mistake within a day.
The claim first appeared in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, on September 22, 2024 (archived here). The post read:
If a state left Trump off of the ballot, do you think the media would respond with a shrug of the shoulders? The Montana Secretary of State left Kamala Harris off the ballot. Not RFK Jr, not Jill Stein. Kamala Harris. They should be forced to start over & the SoS should be jailed
This is what the post looked at the time of the publication of this fact check:
(Source: X screenshot taken Tue Oct 1 17:53:00 2024 UTC)
The post then became a meme. The activist group Occupy Democrats posted the meme on Instagram the following day (archived here).
At the time of this writing, Occupy Democrats had updated the post with a correction, as seen below:
(Source: Instagram screenshot taken Mon Sept 30 20:35:14 2024)
According to the Montana secretary of state's list of registered federal candidates (archived here) for the 2024 general election, Vice President Kamala Harris has been registered in Montana since August 16, 2024, as the Democratic Party's presidential candidate.
The claim that her name does not appear on Montana's ballot for the 2024 general election stems from a glitch in Montana's Electronic Absentee System (EAS), an online platform that registered absentee Montana voters living abroad can use in a federal election to access their absentee ballot and select candidates. The secretary of state's office, which oversees election procedures, also mails paper ballots to these voters, an official EAS overview said.
On the morning of Friday, September 20, 2024, when access opened to the EAS, Harris' name did not appear on the ballot there, according to complaints filed by overseas Montana voters with state election officials, Montana's Daily Inter Lake (archived here) and Daily Montanan (archived here) news sites reported.
The secretary of state's office stated in a September 23, 2024, press release (archived here) that it took the system offline that Friday morning to correct the problem and restored it, with Harris' name on the ballot, by the afternoon. The Office referred to the number of voters affected by the glitch as "few."
It provided in the press release a screenshot of Montana's 2024 ballot for the general election that included Harris' name, as seen below:
(Source: Montana Secretary of State press release, posted Sept. 23, 2024)
One of the registered absentee Montana voters affected, Max Himsl, confirmed to the news agency AFP (archived here) on September 24, 2024, that Harris' name had been returned to the ballot on the EAS.
The secretary of state's office denounced as "egregious misinformation" online claims that it had not registered Harris for its 2024 general-election ballot.
In its news release, the office indicated that the technical glitch did not impact paper ballots sent to registered absentee voters or used at polling stations in Montana. It urged voters to rely on "trusted sources for credible election information, including the secretary of state's office and the state's 56 county election offices."
Other Lead Stories fact checks on claims related to the 2024 U.S. general election can be read here.
Other fact-checking agencies have also reviewed this claim, including FactCheck.org and AFP.
