Get an insider’s look into what’s happening in and around the halls of power with expert reporting, analysis and insight from the editors and reporters of Montana Free Press. Sign up to get the free Capitolized newsletter delivered to your inbox every Thursday. Sign up April 23, 2026 The Postal Service was first to notice that something wasn’t right with the ballot return envelopes in Gallatin County’s 2026 school elections. When the envelopes containing the earliest returned ballots were scanned the week of April 20 by USPS, the destination came up “Poplar,” a small town on the Fort Peck Assiniboine and Sioux Reservation some 448 miles northeast of the elections office at the Gallatin County Courthouse in Bozeman. The pre-printed Gallatin County Election Administrator address on the envelope was correct. The barcode wasn’t. “There’s no ballots going to Poplar, but that barcode is programmed for Poplar,” Gallatin County Clerk and Recorder Eric Semerad told Capitolized Thursday. Postal workers are now sorting the ballots according to the address printed on the envelopes and ignoring the barcode. It’s no small matter because school elections are conducted entirely by mail, which in Gallatin County this spring involves 77,500 ballots, Semerad said — a record for the county, which is second only to Yellowstone County in registered voters. Ballots were mailed to voters April 17 and must be back at the elections office by May 5. The barcode mix-up concerns the template envelope used by county election offices across the state. All the pertinent local information is added to the template used by the printer to produce the envelopes. In Gallatin County’s case, the sample barcode on the template wasn’t replaced with a barcode specific to Gallatin County. The template barcode happens to be for Poplar. That’s the same barcode that’s on the already printed envelopes for Gallatin County’s June 2 primary election, which features some doozy races for the state Legislature, none bigger than incumbent Republican Sen. Shelley Vance and challenger Caleb Hinkle in Senate District 34 in Gallatin Valley, and Democrats Kelly Kortum and Becky Edwards in Senate District 32, which runs from Montana State University to Four Corners. “We’re able to fix the printing situation on the primary ballot, because we’re processing those right now. They don’t get mailed until May 8,” Semerad said. For the school election, county clerks are blocking out the barcode on return envelopes issued to voters who registered after April 17. The school election will work as it always does, and people should vote with confidence, Semerad said. Capitolized contacted several election offices across the state to determine whether the return envelope issue was widespread. No other election office reported barcode issues. The more widespread challenge tripping up voters is the state’s new requirement that voters write their birth year on return ballot envelopes, first applied in the November 2025 municipal elections. Election clerks in the state’s most populous counties told Montana Free Press last fall that they committed staff to contacting voters who didn’t follow the new instructions, and thus risked having their ballot disqualified. Clerks managing elections for Montana’s six largest cities reported rejecting 2,700 ballots for a missing birth year. Another 1,278 ballots were rejected for missing required signatures.  Voters residing outside of city limits are getting their first exposure to the birth year requirement in this year’s school elections.  —Tom Lutey The Art of the Wheels Details of U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy’s April 11 emergency landing in a field near Ennis are still hazy, but FAA records of the incident are providing information not included in the 35-word disclosure posted by the senator’s staff following the bellyflop. The Czechoslovakian fighter-jet-style trainer was the Aero Vodochody model L-39. The specs for the jet suggest it can travel faster than 437 mph. The particular jet that was flown by Sheehy, a Republican, is part of the Polaris “Ghost Squadron,” a private collection of high-performance jets owned by astronaut and NASA administrator Jared Isaacman. Squadron flights over southwest Montana can be found on YouTube.  The FAA identified the jet Sen. Tim Sheehy made an emergency landing in April 10 as an Aero-Vodochody L-39 Albatros. Credit: American Airpower Museum The Ghost Squadron is housed on the outskirts of Belgrade at Yellowstone International Airport, which is also home to Bridger Aerospace, an aerial wildfire-fighting business started by Sheehy. The FAA indicates the L-39’s landing gear wasn’t down when Sheehy landed the jet. “Sen. Sheehy was engaged in a routine flight training exercise which he completes twice a year. The aircraft experienced a mechanical engine failure,” the senator’s chief of staff, Mike Berg, posted on X the afternoon of the landing.  Isaacman owes his current job as NASA administrator to Sheehy, according to Sheehy, who told Semafor last December that he not only initially refused to vote for President Donald Trump’s nomination for U.S. ambassador to India, Sergio Gor, but he put a hold on the Gor nomination and wouldn’t relent until Trump reconsidered Isaacman to lead NASA. U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Montana Isaacman’s nomination had been withdrawn by Trump in May 2025 following confirmation hearings a month earlier. The president then renominated Isaacman on Nov. 4, a move that Sheehy took credit for brokering in the Semafor article, which was headlined “How one Montana senator managed to move the Trump White House — twice.” Sheehy described negotiating Isaacman’s renomination with Vice President J.D. Vance in exchange for Sheehy removing his hold on the Gor nomination. Sheehy’s official Dec. 17 response to Isaacman’s confirmation was laudatory toward Trump and made no mention of any artful deals brokered by the first-term senator.  “For nearly 70 years, the United States has been at the forefront of space exploration. President Trump knows how critical it is to reinvigorate NASA as we aim to reach new heights in the greatest frontier ever known, and that’s why he chose exactly the right man for the job. I’m proud to see Jared Isaacman confirmed as our NASA administrator and confident he will work tirelessly to ensure America wins the 21st century space race.” —Tom Lutey The post Unhappy returns in Gallatin County appeared first on Montana Free Press. ...read more read less