Park County commissioners were set to pick a new assessor from three candidates Tuesday forwarded by the local Republican Party. But things did not go as planned.

After learning of errors the Park County Republican Party made in its nominating process, commissioners said they believed a judge should pick the replacement for retired Assessor Pat Meyer. Meanwhile, two of the finalists filed suit on Wednesday and asked a judge to instead order the commissioners to choose from the party’s nominees.

None of the commissioners felt they could proceed with voting on the candidates, with some expressing concern that the party’s errors would open the county up to liability.

“The process seems like it was flawed, if that’s a fair word,” Commissioner Kelly Simone said during Tuesday’s afternoon meeting.

“Assuredly it was flawed,” Park County Republican Party Chairman Martin Kimmet responded, “because [otherwise] I wouldn’t be sitting in this seat right now.”

The plan was for the commissioners to briefly interview the nominees — financial adviser and party vice chairman Bob Ferguson, longtime teacher Allen Gilbert and Cody City Councilman Don Shreve — then pick one to serve as assessor through January 2027. But Kimmet reached out Tuesday morning to report a problem.

Voting issue

Roughly 85 members of the party’s central committee selected the nominees last week from a pool of six applicants. The process involved three rounds of voting, including an initial “primary” to winnow the field from six to five. Terry Call — a longtime employee in the assessor’s office and Meyer’s pick for the job — wound up as the odd man out in the primary, finishing one vote behind Paul Lanchbury of Cody, 56-55.

However, there was a problem. Under the rules adopted by the committee, members were required to vote for five candidates and any ballots containing more or less than five votes were supposed to be declared null and void. The total tally from the 84 ballots cast should have been a multiple of five, but the figure instead came to 417 — indicating one or more ballots contained fewer than five votes and yet still were counted.

The issue wasn’t squarely addressed at the meeting, but on Monday, precinct committeewoman Brandi Nelson of Cody requested to review the ballots. Then on Tuesday, she, Kimmet and another committeewoman, Jodie Thompson, conducted a recount. Kimmet said they found that two under-voted ballots had improperly been included in the results. Additionally, he said they found that a vote for one of the candidates was missed. When those corrections were made, he said Lanchbury and Call tied with 55 votes.

Had the pair faced off in a tie-breaking round, it’s unclear how the voting would have shaken out, and that uncertainty concerned the commissioners. Three of the commissioners — Simone, Scott Steward and Chair Dossie Overfield — are also precinct committee people and participated in last week’s GOP meeting. 

“I for one … have trouble voting on a process that we know had a flaw in it, what could be a significant flaw,” said Overfield.

No re-dos

The only way to truly settle the issue would be to redo the process, Overfield and Kimmet noted, but given a tight 15-day timeline imposed by state statute, they said there wasn’t enough time to call and host another GOP meeting.

“I have put a lot of thought into this thing and I have not come up with the solution,” Kimmet said.

Given the error, none of the commissioners were willing to go forward.

“I don’t want to put the county in jeopardy and open ourselves up for further litigation or something for doing this wrong,” said Commissioner Lloyd Thiel.

Along with his colleagues, Thiel supported taking no action on the three nominees and to instead turn the decision over to a district court judge.

“... we had hoped that you had come up with a valid vote count,” Commissioner Scott Mangold told Kimmet. “That would make this real simple.”

As chairman, Kimmet said he took full responsibility for the errors.

“I apologize that I have put this in your guys’ laps,” he told the commissioners, “because it’s not fair to you, it’s not really fair to the applicants, probably.”

Two of the applicants, Ferguson and Gilbert, filed a request for a preliminary injunction in Park County District Court on Wednesday, asking a judge to order the commissioners to pick one of the names forwarded by the party. They argue that Kimmet’s recount was unapproved and that state statutes “do not allow for any interpretation of the central committee’s selection process by the board of commissioners.”

Meanwhile, precinct committeewoman Stefanie Bell filed a separate petition in the district court that asks a judge to proceed with picking a new assessor.

As of Wednesday afternoon, no hearings had been scheduled.

Multiple missteps

After decades in the assessor’s office, Meyer retired at the end of December in the middle of his term, triggering a search for a replacement. The Park County Republican Party’s role in the process got off to a bad start, when the party sent out a notice and placed a newspaper ad that mistakenly listed the wrong email address for applications. That error impacted at least one candidate, Dave Baker of Powell, who submitted an application to the outdated email account that had been listed. However, Baker finally managed to get a hold of a party official hours before last week’s meeting. Although he’d missed the application deadline, he was allowed to participate due to the email snafu. No other assessor candidates have come forward to complain of their application being lost, but other trouble popped up in the first round of voting.

In a Tuesday interview, precinct committeeman Colin Simpson, a former legislator and party chairman, said he and a couple others noticed the 417 vote total was not a multiple of five. Simpson said he approached Kimmet during the meeting and pointed out that, when the total was divided by five, it resulted in 83.4 ballots. 

Simpson’s intended point was that it should have been an even number, but that was apparently lost in translation. Kimmet indicated in a Monday interview that he’d understood the concern to be about the number of ballots cast. As a result, Kimmet said he only checked the number of ballots cast (not the results themselves) and felt confident when there were no extras.

Simpson, meanwhile, let the issue go without ever raising a formal objection before the body.

“Certainly in retrospect it should have been done,” Simpson said of objecting, “but all anybody had to do was add them up and divide by five.”

A question of ‘election integrity’

A potential contributing factor to the oversight is that while the tally sheets were made available for anyone to review, the vote totals were never read aloud at the meeting; only the winners and losers of each round were announced. For example, following the second round of voting, the body was told that Ferguson and Gilbert had claimed two of the nominations and that another vote was needed to determine the final nominee. It went unmentioned that Lanchbury and Shreve had tied with 46 votes apiece, with Baker finishing further back.

Simone noted on Tuesday that, according to the party’s rules, there should have been a tie-breaking vote between just Lanchbury and Shreve, but Baker was also included. Unlike the first round error involving Call and Lanchbury, that discrepancy had no apparent bearing on the results: Shreve received more votes (46) than Lanchbury (27) and Baker (7) combined.

But Simone said she believed the process was ineffective.

“I have a lot of respect for every candidate that applied for this position, and I think as a matter of election integrity, we owe each candidate a fair chance,” she said.

‘One of the most difficult things’

Kimmet noted that everyone makes mistakes, including in elections — such as Florida’s infamous struggles with “hanging chads” in the 2000 presidential election.

“I can see where you could make a mistake,” Kimmet added of Thursday’s initial count, which was done by a three-person team, “because I went through those ballots a lot of times and I didn’t pick up on everything and didn’t find the real flaw until … the three of us sat down this morning and went through them.”

He said he hoped that the state adopts uniform rules for political parties to use during the nomination process, noting that it’s a relatively rare procedure.

Kimmet remarked that reporting the error to the commission was “probably one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done,” but that he was glad the mistake had been caught. 

In their request for a preliminary injunction, Ferguson and Gilbert described it differently. They criticized Tuesday’s recount as “private, unapproved and unobserved” and said that Kimmet “lacked the authority to hold such a recount or invalidate the vote by the entire Park [County] Republican Central Committee.”

Ferguson and Gilbert also charge that the commissioners were wrong to defer the decision to a district court judge.

The judicial process

When commissioners fail to fill a vacancy within 20 days of an official resignation, state law says anyone can file a petition and ask “the judge of the district court” to fill the vacancy; the judge then has 30 days to fill the position.

Bell theoretically started the clock with her Wednesday petition, but it’s unclear what impact Ferguson and Gilbert’s suit will have on the process.

If the decision is left up to a judge, they are free to pick any other property-owning Republican in the county. However, they could also theoretically choose to only consider the three names put forward by the party or the six applicants.

Both of the district court judges within the Fifth Judicial District have ties to the process, as Judge Bill Simpson of Cody is Colin Simpson’s brother and Judge Bobbi Overfield of Worland is Chair Overfield’s daughter-in-law.

(Editor's note 2/7/25: This version of the story has been corrected to reflect that Kimmet not only mentioned two undervoted ballots, but also a missed vote for a candidate. It also removes an incorrect statement about how many candidates were listed on the undervoted ballots.)