KALISPELL — With election season fast approaching, Flathead County was busy on Wednesday training the next batch of election judges.
"I refer to it as Super Bowl Sunday; we work for six months to put this together, so it's nice to see all of the beautiful faces in there getting ready to be trained," said Flathead County Election Administrator Paula Buff.
Nearly 300 Flathead residents filled the technology building at Flathead Valley Community College Wednesday to take training lessons preparing to serve as election judges.
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"Those real-world scenarios where people get more familiar with the equipment and just the whole layout and the process and all of those things," added Buff.
Buff said election judges serve important roles during elections, such as greeting voters, issuing ballots and verifying voter eligibility.
"We have to train 300-plus election judges, we’ve got 56 precincts, each one of those precincts has four election judges, you start doing the math it quickly adds up, so it really does take a village," Buff said.
Kalispell resident John Weber has served as an election judge eight times.
He said being an election judge helps strengthen democracy and builds trust in Flathead County elections.
“There’s a lot of controversy about voting and all of the rules and regulations, and I think if a person has serious questions like that the best thing they could do is come get involved, see the process, and I think that would resolve a lot of the fears, answer a lot of the questions,” Weber said.
More information on upcoming elections can be found here.
