Dear editor:

At the March 7 GOP meeting we were made aware that the clerks' office is requesting the use of electronic polling books (e-poll books) at all voting locations in Park County. A presentation was made by Hans Odde at the March 5 Park County Commissioners’ meeting with a request for a decision by March 19. This is after Sen. Dan Laursen (R-Powell) and I gave a presentation on Feb. 6 at a standing room only commissioners’ meeting to ask for their blessing to stop using machines (electronic tabulators) to count the vote.  

Odde claimed the benefit of e-poll books capability is to prevent people from voting twice (which he stated he hasn't seen) and for immediate awareness of felons voting. However, a much more significant problem that we have experienced in Park County is the exposure to cyber security threats, or hacking. Yet, these proposed e-polling machines will be online over the internet throughout the entire voting process at each polling location.

Some examples of recent cyberattacks include Carbon County in December 2023, Campbell County Health in the fall of 2019 when hit with a ransom attack that disabled its network, and here in Cody in April 2018, the city's and county's email accounts were blacklisted by servers after hackers accessed email accounts to deliver 50,000 spam messages which shut down their operations for weeks. Even our governor said in a December 2022 Cowboy State Daily article, Wyoming needs millions of dollars to address evolving cyberattack threats.  

In addition to security threats, e-poll books have a high upfront cost, require ongoing expenses every election, and require a software representative to be present at each voting site on Election Day. A March 12 Powell Tribune article reported our county IT director suggests defraying some of the expenses by allowing the e-polling laptops to be used by other departments in other months of the year. This usage for other purposes further exposes them to hacking. I informed the commissioners Feb. 6 of over 1,500 election fraud cases as of January 2024 that have been finally adjudicated involving the use of voting machines and drop boxes.  

While the county clerk employees gave the commissioners just two weeks to make a decision on the e-polling books, Laursen and I gave the commissioners two months to make a decision on eliminating the voting machines so they could review what nefarious things are going on and survey the public's legitimate concerns. In our Powell-area surveys, we found 88% of residents want to get rid of the machines. The public deserves a public meeting on this new e-poll books issue prior to any commitments made by the county. 

Dave McMillan

Southfork