Though it took some double-checking, a hand-counted audit of Park County’s election results ultimately confirmed the figures that were tallied by machine.

Under the direction of the county clerk’s office, a group of eight election judges spent half of Tuesday manually reviewing the 691 ballots that were cast on the North and South forks on Election Day. The judges checked the results of three races: for the U.S. House of Representatives, for governor and for House District 24. 

A couple of the tallies were initially one vote off of the machines’ counts.

When the group added up the South Fork votes for Republican Quin Blair in HD 24, they counted one more vote than the machine. However, the judges later agreed that one faint pen mark left beside Blair’s name wasn’t actually a vote. That resolved the discrepancy.

In the other instance, it appeared the workers accidentally gave one of Republican gubernatorial candidate Eric Barlow’s votes in Wapiti to Constitution Party candidate Rebecca Bextel. When the group rechecked those ballots, they counted 124 votes for Barlow and 70 for Bextel, matching the official totals from the DS200 tabulator.

A new (old) process

Prior to this election cycle, it had been many years since any of Wyoming’s results had been tabulated by hand. But in response to growing concerns about the accuracy and security of voting machines, the Legislature required county clerks to manually check certain races on about 5% of the primary and general election ballots.

Following August’s primary, Park County hand audited 524 ballots that were cast in Powell. That review similarly confirmed the machine count.

“I think that the exercise proved what we already knew about elections and about our tabulators — that they are accurate,” Park County Clerk-elect Hans Odde said following Tuesday’s audit. He added that on Tuesday, “the human error was much greater than the machine error.”

Beyond the two discrepancies in the results, the judges’ initial tally of the total number of ballots cast on the South Fork was one short. However, a second count confirmed there were indeed 470 sheets of paper.

A longer process

In Tuesday’s audit, the eight judges reviewed only about 2,073 of the roughly 508,458 individual votes that were cast or left blank in the county’s general election. That’s about 0.4% of the total.

The judges, who were split into a pair of four-person teams, took roughly four-and-a-half hours to get through the audit.

“You throw in the rest of the ballot on that, and that’s a huge, huge amount of time and manpower,” Odde said.

The process was not designed for speed or for a full recount, but at Tuesday’s pace, it would have theoretically taken more than 8,000 man-hours — the equivalent of 1,000 people putting in a full work day — to hand count the entire ballot. 

Using the machines, Park County had all of its unofficial results tabulated and posted online within two hours of the polls closing.

Machine concerns

However, the primary public concern with the tabulators relates not to their speed but whether the devices can be hacked or manipulated.

More concerns were stoked in Wyoming in late 2024, when the Weston County Clerk’s Office distributed flawed ballots and caused skewed results in two local races. A routine audit should have caught some of the issues, but the check was haphazardly performed by then-Clerk Becky Hadlock, who wrongly certified that the results were correct; Hadlock pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of violating the state’s election code and resigned her post earlier this year.

Speaking generally on Tuesday, Odde noted that county clerks are required to test their machines ahead of each election; that includes testing the ballots.

“We know what they are programmed to do, and they do what they’re programmed to do,” Odde said of the machines.

With the exception of Rep. Dalton Banks of Cowley and Sen. Ed Cooper of Ten Sleep, Park County’s legislative delegation supported bills in last winter’s session that would have switched the state to entirely hand-counted elections. However, the broader Legislature rejected the bills and five of the county’s eight lawmakers have since been replaced. (Banks, Cooper and Sen. Tim French, R-Heart Mountain, are the three returning members.)

Audit’s future rests with Legislature

The incoming Legislature will decide whether to continue the hand count audit. If the body takes no action, the audit will end, as it was only authorized for this year’s elections.

Odde said he expects the state’s county clerks will offer a report about how the process played out and then let lawmakers decide what’s next.

“We’ll give them the facts,” he said, and then, “We’ll let the chips fall where they may.”