The difference between Park County’s unofficial election results and the final official tallies? One ballot.

When the county’s three-member canvas board convened on Thursday, Aug. 20, the panel accepted one provisional ballot cast in Clark. The Republican voter had misplaced her driver’s license on primary Election Day, but found her ID and presented it to the clerk’s office before closing time on Aug. 19. That allowed her choices to be counted.

With the additional ballot in the mix, a total of 10,061 votes were officially cast in the county’s primary election. No results changed, but some candidates — including gubernatorial contender Brent Bien, treasurer candidate Troy Bray and county attorney candidate Ericka Smith — added one more vote to their final tallies.

The canvas board — made up of Clerk Colleen Renner, Republican Denise Shirley of Wapiti and Democrat Andy Lowe of Powell — also helped audit 89 randomly selected ballots. The state-mandated review involved examining 625 different votes to ensure that what was logged by the tabulators matched what the voter marked on the ballot. The check was performed by looking at a scanned image of the paper ballot and comparing it to the machine’s so-called “cast vote record.”

Through the audit, “everything passed, everything was confirmed,” said Elections Deputy Katie Johnson, with no discrepancies between the ballot markings and logged votes.

In past years, that would have been the final step, but under a law passed by the Legislature last winter, the clerk’s office also needs to audit a portion of the results by hand.

Senate File 113 requires county clerks to hand-audit roughly 5% of the total ballots cast. For Park County, an electronic tabulator deployed at the fairgrounds in Powell was the closest to that mark. The 524 ballots processed by the machine — representing 5.2% of the total primary turnout — will be turned over to an audit board that’s made up of 12 election judges; Johnson said they tried to pick people with a mix of views about hand counting.

The panel will then manually count the results for the U.S. Senate, state superintendent of public instruction and all the legislative races that appeared on the Powell area ballots (Senate District 19 and house district 25, 26 and 50).

Although it’s not required by the new statute, Renner and her staff decided to also hand-audit one of the contested county races. The canvas board randomly picked between the races for county attorney, clerk and treasurer, and the slip for the treasurer’s race was drawn.

The county commission race was also contested, but Johnson said she didn’t think it was the right choice for the new hand count; with three available seats and 10 Republican candidates, it would have meant checking three times as many votes, generally split among five times as many candidates.

“While I would love to go there, I just think it’s far too complex with us having never conducted hand counting before … and really not knowing how this is going to look and what pitfalls there might be,” Johnson said.

The office also ruled out the uncontested races for county sheriff, assessor and clerk of district court, believing a hand count of those contests “really wouldn’t prove much of anything,” she said.

The hand audit will begin at 9 a.m. today (Thursday) and Johnson expects the task to take no more than five hours.

(Editor's note: This version corrects that all legislative races will be counted.)