Justin Waterworth

A recount confirmed that Justin Waterworth won a seat on the Powell City Council, narrowly besting longtime Councilman Tim Sapp in Ward 3.

The official, recounted results that were finalized on Friday wound up exactly matching the unofficial ones released on election night: Waterworth received 248 votes (49.9%) to Sapp’s 246 (49.5%).

“After winning the primary by one vote and the general election by two, I’ve apparently decided that comfortable margins just aren’t my style,” Waterworth quipped in a Thursday Facebook post.

He offered his thanks to the elections staffers for their work, to Sapp for his many years of service and to everyone who participated in the election.

“... I’m looking forward to getting to work, learning from my fellow council members, and representing everyone in Ward 3, including those who voted for Tim [Sapp],” Waterworth told the Tribune last week.

Sapp also offered his thanks to his supporters.

“It was a good race,” he said Monday. “I don’t mind good competition — and good, clean competition — so it is what it is.”

Sapp has served on the council for 20 years. He said change isn’t a bad thing.

“I’ve had a good run at it,” he said, adding that, “People had their chance to make their voice [heard]. That’s the democratic thing about it.”

The recount further confirmed that the council will have a new look in 2027.

While Ward 2 councilmembers Zane Logan and Kristy Fields were reelected, Holly Cole was chosen to replace outgoing Councilman Steve Lensegrav. Additionally, Mayor John Wetzel will be exiting mid-term to join the Wyoming Legislature. A councilmember will need to fill the mayoral role for the next two years — and then that councilmember will need to be replaced. As a result, four of the seven seats on the city government will be new to their roles next year.

Recount process

With Sapp’s vote total coming within 1% of Waterworth’s, state law required the Park County Clerk’s Office to double check the results. Staff gathered up the 569 ballots that were cast in Ward 3, then recounted them with the oversight of the county’s three-member canvas board on Thursday.

The Powell ballots had originally been read by three DS200 electronic tabulators that were stationed at the Park County Fairgrounds on Election Day and another DS200 that had been deployed in the Park County Courthouse for early voting. For the recount, the 569 sheets of paper were fed through a different machine — a speedier, open-ended DS450 — that confirmed the tabulations of the other four machines.

That included 67 undervotes (where the voter left that race blank), five overvotes (where the voter marked two or more ovals) and three write-ins (where the voter presumably wrote in the name of someone other than Sapp or Waterworth).

No ballots in that race were manually reviewed, said First Deputy Park County Clerk Hans Odde, and the whole thing took a little over a half-hour.

Ongoing audit

The clerk’s staff and the canvas board — made up of Clerk Colleen Renner, Republican Denise Shirley of Wapiti and Democrat Geoff Baumann of Powell — did look over parts of 44 ballots as a part of a statewide post-election audit.

Together, they looked at the scanned images of those ballots and ensured that the voters’ marks for Congress, the five statewide offices and Proposition 1 matched the votes logged by the tabulators. All 691 of those votes were tallied correctly, Odde said.

On Election Day, there had been two provisional ballots cast by county residents who’d been flagged by the state’s voter registration system as potential felons. Those votes had until Wednesday to prove that their voting rights had been restored, but they did not, so their ballots were not counted, Odde said. He added that a third apparent felon decided not to vote after being flagged by the WyoReg system.

In past years, there were instances where felons were able to register to vote on Election Day and cast their ballots before anyone learned of their past history. However, the clerk’s office’s decision to switch to electronic pollbooks this year allowed election judges to immediately check their identities and turn away potential felons — or non-citizens — in real time.

On Friday morning, the canvas board certified the county’s results with no changes from the unofficial tallies on election night.

However, the clerk’s office still has one final step: Today (Tuesday) at the courthouse, election judges will conduct a separate hand count audit of the 2,073 ballots that were cast at the South Fork fire hall and Wapiti school on Election Day. A similar audit was performed following the primary and came back as an exact match to the machines’ count.