With a record number of voters casting absentee ballots in Tuesday’s primary election, the Park County Clerk’s Office is getting a head start on processing them.
Under state law, …
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With a record number of voters casting absentee ballots in Tuesday’s primary election, the Park County Clerk’s Office is getting a head start on processing them.
Under state law, county clerks are generally prohibited from processing ballots outside of Election Day, but Wyoming Secretary of State Ed Buchanan has granted an exception amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Buchanan issued a directive earlier this month allowing clerks to process absentee ballots today (Thursday) and Friday. The intent, he said, is to give clerks enough time to process the larger volume of absentee ballots and still provide timely election results.
“An influx of absentee ballot requests and absentee ballots returned to the county clerks as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic has placed an undue burden on county clerks to fulfill their statutory requirement of processing absentee ballots only on Election Day and to provide election results to the Secretary of State’s Office on election night,” Buchanan wrote.
The Park County Clerk’s Office had issued 5,568 absentee ballots and received more than 3,800 back as of Wednesday. It’s a massive jump from the 2016 primary election, when 1,503 voters cast absentee ballots. The clerk’s office notified the Secretary of State’s Office last week that it wanted to take advantage of the extra days of processing.
Teams of sworn election judges will begin working at the Park County Courthouse at 9 a.m. both today (Thursday) and Friday, opening envelopes, removing ballots and feeding them into voting machines.
However, despite the early processing, there will be no early results tallied; that will not happen until Tuesday.
“Absolutely NO results will be known and/or released or incorporated into the final vote count until after the polls close on Election Day,” Clerk Colleen Renner said in a Monday message.
Observers can watch the processing — though they must remain silent, stay at least 6 feet away from absentee processing tables and not interfere with elections workers, among other rules. Absentee ballots will also be processed on Tuesday, Election Day, as usual.
The early processing is only the latest disruption to the election caused by COVID-19. Because of concerns about social distancing and a lack of election judges, Renner closed the physical polling places in Garland, Clark, Heart Mountain, Wapiti and South Fork for both the primary and general elections — a move that has drawn complaints. She’s set to formally notify the Park County commissioners of her decision to keep the four sites closed for November’s general election during their Wednesday meeting, with the item tentatively set to be discussed at 9:35 a.m.