Trego's Mountain Ear

Zooey Zephyr has made the national stage from Montana’s House banning the representative from speaking.  It’s kind of rough having a state representative who is banned from speaking – and I suspect Missoula is the only place in Montana to elect a transexual to the house.  Here, we tend to elect old retired republicans – but let’s look at how many Montana districts didn’t get a choice of candidates to represent them:

Thirty-one of Montana’s 100 state representatives have no opponent in the general election.  Since legislative districts are apportioned according to population, this essentially translates to 31% of Montanans who had no choice to vote on their state representative last November.

Zooey at least won the election to the state house – a place where 31% of the candidates were unopposed in the general election.  Nothing personal – but when a competitively elected representative gets banned from speaking, in an assembly where 31% of the membership ran unopposed, it may say as much about our state house of representatives as it does about the silenced representative. 

It’s unclear how “elected” those 31% actually were. In Lincoln County, Mike Cuffe and Neil Durham were effectively chosen by Election Administrator Paula Buffe when she decided to ignore write-in votes. It seems probable that this is the case for the others in their counties.