HELENA — On Monday afternoon, a group of four volunteers hit the sidewalks around Helena’s downtown Walking Mall, with a pitch for passing voters. They were gathering signatures to get Constitutional Initiative 132 – a proposed measure that would amend the Montana Constitution to ensure the state’s judicial elections remain nonpartisan – onto the November ballot.
“There's many, many things we agree on, and that is the case with the courts,” said Linda Gryczan, one of the signature gatherers. “Is a Democrat or Republican judge going to make a better decision about your divorce?”
(Watch the video for the latest on where CI-132 stands.)
Montana has required judicial candidates to run without political party labels since 1936. However, Republican lawmakers proposed a series of bills during the 2025 legislative session that would have changed that system.
CI-132 would add a section to the Montana Constitution, saying “Judicial elections shall remain nonpartisan.” If voters pass it, it would essentially prevent the Legislature from switching to partisan elections without another voter-approved amendment.
Organizers with Montanans for Nonpartisan Courts, the committee backing CI-132, say they’ve trained about 170 volunteers to gather signatures so far. They include people like Nancy Sweeney, who served as Lewis and Clark County’s elected clerk of district court for 20 years.
“We've had fair and impartial decisions for all that time, and to change it would be a mistake,” she said.
Sweeney says the most common question she’s heard from the people she talks to is why they should support an amendment that wouldn’t make any changes to the status quo.
“We need the amendment so we quit wasting time about it,” she said. “I think most Montanans would support keeping politics out of a lot of government business, but especially in the courts, and let the courts do what they do best, which is to decide impartially.”
The arguments for adding party labels to judicial elections have come from many Montana Republicans, who argue the current system deprives voters of important information about how a judicial candidate sees the world – and that it isn't actually unbiased, but in fact disadvantages conservatives.
Gov. Greg Gianforte said at an event last week that the courts were holding back policies like school choice, and that partisan judicial elections were needed to change that.
Meanwhile, CI-132 was a major topic during the Montana Republican Party’s Winter Kickoff event in Great Falls Friday. State party chair Art Wittich said Republicans plan to get more actively involved in the race for an open Montana Supreme Court seat this year, after court rulings have delayed or struck down a long list of Republican-backed laws.
“We can control the legislature, we can elect a Republican governor, and we have great laws being overturned,” he said. “And we have to do something about it.”
Wittich said defeating CI-132 would be one of the party’s four biggest priorities for 2026.
“It's phony,” he said. “The Democrats and the wings of the Democrat Party control the Montana Supreme Court races, and they have for many, many years.”
One of the speakers at the kickoff event was Rob Natelson, a former law professor and political candidate from Montana, who pointed to dozens of lawsuits filed against Republican legislation since Gianforte took office in 2021. He argued GOP lawmakers were not deliberately passing unconstitutional bills and that the Supreme Court was overstepping its proper role.
“The problem arises because the courts are both misinterpreting the state constitution, and because they are ignoring their own rule that democratically adopted laws must be sustained unless they're proved unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Natelson.
Those in attendance also heard from Supreme Court candidate Dan Wilson, a Flathead County district court judge, who called himself a “constitutional conservative” and argued current Supreme Court justices had become “activist.”
MTN asked the CI-132 signature gatherers how they would respond to the argument that the current system had shown a bias to one side. Gryczan said making a change based on that feeling would be a mistake.
“Your party may be the one that may be advantaged at first, but it will change,” she said. “It's far better if we have our judges on their fairness, on their education and and their ability to make good decisions.”
In order to get on the ballot, CI-132 will need at least 60,241 signatures from registered voters, including a minimum number in 40 of Montana’s 100 state legislative districts. The deadline to get those signatures in will be in June. A spokesperson for Montanans for Nonpartisan Courts told MTN Monday that they’ve collected around 10,000 so far, but they haven’t been validated yet to confirm whether they are from eligible signers.
