Gov. Steve Bullock is giving county election officials across Montana permission to conduct the general election entirely by mail, as they did for the June primary.
The governor, who will be on the November ballot as the Democratic candidate for the Senate, said Thursday he was issuing the order at the request of the county clerks and election administrators. During the all-mail primary, the state saw a surge in voter turnout.
California, Nevada, Vermont and Washington, D.C. have already opted to send each voter an absentee ballot this fall due to the coronavirus. Before the pandemic, five other states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — already had plans to conduct an all-mail election.
Bullock's directive still requires counties to make in-person voting available if they choose to conduct the election primarily by mail. Absentee ballots will be sent by Oct. 9 with return postage paid.
"It only makes sense that we start preparing now to ensure that no Montanan will have to choose between their vote or their health," Bullock said. "They didn't have to in June and they shouldn't have to in November."
All 56 counties opted for an all-mail primary in June, and it's almost certain they will do the same for the general election. The primary saw the highest rate of voter participation in almost 50 years, with 55 percent of registered voters returning ballots — 10 percentage points higher than the 2016 primary.
Bullock is in a highly competitive race against Republican incumbent Steve Daines, who is seeking a second Senate term. President Trump — who has spent months asserting without evidence that expansive mail voting leads to fraud — is likely but not a lock to carry the state's three electoral votes, according to recent polls. The last Democrat to carry the state was Bill Clinton in 1992.
Demonstrators rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court as justices hear oral arguments on whether President Donald Trump can deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily, on Capitol Hill, in Washington, Wednesday, April 1, 2026. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)
Luz Angela Nuñez with her daughter Aisha Quershi Nuñez at their home in College Point, Queens. Photo: Mia Anzalone for Documented.
Kimberly Alvarez, 25, with her daughter Evangeline and her husband John Alvarez in Medellin, Colombia. Photo courtesy of Kimberly Alvarez.Alvarez arrived in New York City in February 2024 with her husband John Alvarez as asylum seekers from Venezuela. In April 2025, Alvarez found out she was pregnant with her first child, a baby girl. Her first reaction, she said, was fear.“How am I going to keep her alive?” she said. “That’s what I was thinking. ‘How am I going to be able to take care of her?’”At the beginning of Alvarez’s pregnancy, she said she was aware of the immigration enforcement occurring around the country, but vowed not to let it deter her from showing up to her doctor’s appointments.“When you went out, you were always on alert because you didn’t know if [ICE] might be around. I never saw anything suspicious,” Alvarez said. “But of course, you feel scared.”In October, when Alvarez was six months pregnant, her husband was detained by ICE agents at 26 Federal Plaza. When the immediate shock wore off, she obsessively checked the Online Detainee Locator System to find out where her husband went. A day later, she discovered that he was being kept at Delaney Hall detention center in New Jersey. Alvarez quickly set up an account to pay for phone calls, and every two days, she would pay about $10 for a one-hour call, updating her husband about the baby, her appointments and how she was doing.“Crying was the only way for me to release the tension,” said Alvarez, who worried that her lack of sleep and bad diet were impacting her baby. “Crying was the only way for me to release the tension.”—Kimberly AlvarezThat tension built up day by day, week by week following her husband’s arrest. Alvarez had stopped her work as a cleaner in the neighborhood’s synagogues two weeks before her husband’s detention because of her pregnancy. The plan, she said, was to rely solely on his income as a maintenance worker for “the food, the rent, everything.” Left with few choices, Kimberley had to rely on her mother’s income as a cleaner. The older woman had moved to New York from North Carolina to assist with Alvarez’s pregnancy. “I feel like I’m supposed to help my mom, not the other way around,” Alvarez said. “I felt powerless because I couldn’t do anything.”On Dec. 9, Alvarez gave birth to a daughter, Evangeline. While her baby was healthy, Alvarez’s anxieties did not go away. While she returned to cleaning synagogues a few months after Evangeline’s birth to help make ends meet, Alvarez and her daughter rarely left home. Alvarez said she felt paralyzed, getting frequent alerts from a neighborhood WhatsApp group when ICE was spotted nearby. One day, she said, ICE arrested her friend’s husband in Sunset Park, in an area where she would sometimes take Evangeline for walks.“I’m so afraid that I’ll go out and run into one of them and that they’ll take her away from me,” Alvarez said. “That’s my biggest fear, that someone will take her away from me and I won’t know where my daughter is.”In March, her husband decided to voluntarily remove himself from the United States and move back to Colombia, where he is originally from. It was a family decision, but it was not a happy one — hiring immigration lawyers was too expensive, Alvarez said, adding that staying in the U.S. felt too uncertain. 
