Shelley Hill

A Powell Valley Hospital Board member who was elected in November had to be appointed to her position last month, after she became temporarily ineligible to serve due to being stricken from the voter rolls.

At its June 26 board meeting, the Powell Valley Hospital District Board approved the appointment of Shelley Hill after a short executive session, which she wasn’t able to participate in. The issue stemmed from Hill not voting in last November’s general election, which she attributed to vision issues that made her unable to properly see the ballot.

Park County First Deputy Clerk Hans Odde said the office sent Hill and the other roughly 4,000 voters who didn’t participate in the election a notice advising them that they had until late January to contact the office and request to remain a registered voter or else they would be purged. Hill, who registered to vote in August when she filed to run for the hospital board, said she didn’t see the letter and thus didn’t know there was a problem. That she’d been removed from the rolls and become ineligible to serve on a public board was only discovered within the last month.

Odde said he realized the problem while doing maintenance on election software and updating board elections and elected positions. He said he quickly brought the matter to the Powell Valley Hospital District’s attention in an early June letter.

“It’s clear in state statute: Board members shall be electors,” Odde said. “If you’re not registered you’re not an elector. You have to be an elector to run — you have to be elector to serve.”

Hill was not present to vote for the new CEO on June 7, which occurred after she was made aware of being ineligible.

Hospital leadership discussed the matter with the rest of the board which, following the June 26 executive session, made the vote to appoint Hill, who made sure to make herself eligible to serve once again.

“I re-registered,” she said. “I’ll just have to request an absentee ballot so I can get help with the reading the ballot.”

Voters with vision issues also have the option of requesting assistance from an election judge at the polls, bringing along a family member or friend or using a machine that reads the ballot aloud.

With Hill now an appointee, she is filling in the term she had vacated and thus will have to run again in the 2024 election if she wants to fill out the final two years of what would have originally been her full four-year term.

While Odde said he hasn’t dealt with this type of situation in Park County before, Hill was one of two county board members to be affected this year, as a Meeteetse Cemetery District Board member was also stricken from the rolls after not voting.