Authorities are investigating whether a few felons illegally voted in Park County’s recent general election.

When the county clerk’s office ran the names of the voters who registered on Election Day through state databases after the election, five people were flagged as potentially having felony convictions. Wyoming law generally makes it a felony crime for a felon to vote or register to vote.

“We are looking into it,” Park County Prosecuting Attorney Bryan Skoric said Friday. “It takes a bit more investigation once we’ve received names from the clerk’s office before we file a case.”

Skoric said that work includes checking whether a person’s criminal history in the National Crime Information Center database is accurate, ensuring it’s not a case of mistaken identity and looking to see whether the person has had their record expunged or their voting rights restored. It could also involve tracking down certified court records that prove the person was convicted.

Ultimately, “if charges are appropriate, we’ll file (them),” Skoric said.

Then-Park County Elections Deputy Teecee Barrett said recently that, in each election cycle, there are always a couple voters who are flagged as potentially being felons and ineligible to vote. In 2014, the clerk’s office sent a letter to the people who were flagged; if they didn’t respond, they were kicked off the voting rolls, Barrett said.

She said it’s “just something there will always be with same-day voter registration, whether it’s deliberate or not.”

When someone registers to vote by mail or in person before the election, the clerk’s office will run their name through the various databases to check their residency and for any felony convictions. However, election judges don’t have access to that software at the polls, where many people register on Election Day.

Given how many people registered to vote on Nov. 8, Barrett said she actually was surprised that the number of possible felons wasn’t a little bit higher.

The five suspicious names were among 1,104 new voter registrations on Election Day. Put another way, if it turns out all five of those people voted in the general election, they made up less than 0.5 percent of Park County’s new registrations. Further, among the 24,384 votes cast, the ballots from five felons would represent 0.02 percent of the total vote.

Confirmed cases of illegal voting are extremely rare in Wyoming. In 2013, Skoric prosecuted a Cody radio broadcaster for registering to vote and then voting in three different Park County elections, despite two 1993 felony convictions in Alaska. That case started when an anonymous caller confronted David Koch about his past and his voting while Koch was hosting a call-in show.

Koch ended up receiving 90 days in jail, three years of supervised probation and paid $510 for two felony counts of false voting and one of false swearing. The sentence in Park County ran alongside another sentence for an earlier voting violation in Big Horn County.

At the time, the state’s election director said it appeared to have been perhaps just the second case of illegal voting since 2000.

Four other Park County voters were flagged by state databases as possibly not being American citizens, but Barrett said further investigation showed all of them actually were citizens.

Slightly more than 55,000 people registered to vote on General Election Day in Wyoming, according to the Secretary of State’s Office; more than 9,000 people registered to vote on the day of the Aug. 16 primary election.

Will Dineen, a spokesman for the Secretary of State’s Office, said his office did not have figures on how many voters were flagged as possibly being felons after the elections; Dineen said the work of cleaning up the voting rolls is generally handled at the county level.