Yellowstone County, Montana retroactively moved ballot-initiative deadline a month earlier at data-center developer's urging, killing citizen petition

On August 4, 2026, the Yellowstone County, Montana attorney's office announced that the signature-gathering deadline for a citizen ballot initiative regulating data-center construction had actually passed weeks earlier, retroactively invalidating the timeline organizers had been working against. County Attorney Scott Twito's office told the county elections administrator that a different state statute -- one governing local initiatives specifically, rather than the ballot-certification statute the county's own elections department had relied on in June -- set the true signature deadline at July 13, not the August 12 date the county had originally given organizers.

Broadview resident Kassi Solberg had submitted the initiative, which would require two-thirds voter approval before any new data center could be built in the county, in June; the county attorney approved its language on June 25. Solberg needed 16,650 signatures and had collected more than 7,700 by the time the county reversed the deadline, working under a compressed timeline created by the county's own initial guidance. Twito told Montana Free Press that the county changed its position after Quantica Infrastructure -- the developer proposing a 5,000-acre, 1,100-megawatt data-center campus near Broadview that the initiative would have regulated -- notified his office on July 30 that the later statute, not the one the county had cited, should govern. Twito said he spent the following weekend researching Quantica's assertion and ultimately agreed with it.

The county separately sued to block the initiative, arguing it also exceeded the county's regulatory authority under a 2026 Montana Supreme Court ruling that invalidated a similar local initiative in Treasure County. At a July 9 commissioners' meeting, Solberg found copies of the county's lawsuit against her, including her home address, distributed on every chair before public comment; commissioners declined to say who had placed them there. Later that month, commissioners considered -- but did not adopt, pulling it from consideration on July 23 after public objection -- a policy that would have required county approval for signature-gathering and other political activity on county property.

Solberg's attorney, Brian Miller, called the retroactive deadline change unconstitutional and said the county had told organizers it was capable of processing signatures through the original August 12 date.

Updates

2026-08-11 — Judge declined to extend the deadline, allowing county's reversal to stand [4]

Yellowstone County District Court Judge Ed Zink denied organizers' request to keep accepting signatures past the county's revised July 13 deadline, ruling that the deadline had passed and that the shortfall could not be cured even if extended to the original August 12 date. Zink wrote it was "regrettable" that the county had given organizers the wrong deadline in the first place but did not find the error sufficient to overturn the county's decision.