Sandy Newsome

Nina Webber

• 
• 

Rep. Sandy Newsome’s narrow win in the House District 24 primary was confirmed Monday after a recount at the Park County Elections office, initiated by challenger Nina Webber, was verified exactly. 

The Park County Elections office began the recount at 9 a.m., feeding the 3,747 ballots cast in that race through the office’s fast, DS450 voting machine used during the election for absentee votes.  

As the recount confirms that Newsome won the race, Webber will be responsible for paying the costs of the recount up to $500, taken from a deposit she has already posted with the secretary of state’s office. 

The county spent $751.35 of employee time on the recount. The county will be responsible for the other roughly $250.

“We’re very pleased that the recount confirmed the initial results,” said Park County Clerk Colleen Renner. “We hope it gives the public additional confidence in our elections here in Wyoming.”

For Newsome the result moved her one step closer to being done with election season. As of press time no one had filed to run against her in November.

“It came out as expected,” Newsome said. “It’s her right to make that request, it’s playing by the rules. I was glad it came out exactly the same.”

Both Newsome and Webber attended the roughly two hour process which was open to the public.

Webber said the decision to ask for a recount came after many of the 49% of HD 24 voters who selected her asked that she request a recount. She said poll watchers in other counties had noted issues with the DS450 voting machine used to count absentee ballots. 

“I had gotten so many calls to do a recount, so I owed it to those people,” Webber said. “I would hope the results would be exactly the same. If we have election equipment that is accurate, I would have expected no different.”

Elections staff spent a few hours Saturday morning
going through ballots by hand and pulling out the 3,747 Republican ballots that contained the HD 24 race, elections staff member CJ Baker said via email.

Because it was a race certified by the state canvassing board, Webber had until Friday — two days after the completion of the state canvas — to request a recount as per state statute. The county elections office is required to complete the recount within 72 hours of receiving the request, so it had to be completed by Monday afternoon.

Under the certified results for the Aug. 16 Republican Primary Election in Park County, Webber received 1,727 votes and Newsome received 1,810 votes, a difference of 83 votes. That fell well outside the 1% margin needed for an automatic recount — just 18 votes or less — but within the margin for the recount deposit to be $500, far less than if the recount margin were above 5%. 

The last recounts in Park County took place after the November 2016 General Election, according to Baker.

One was an automatic recount that confirmed a four-vote victory for Luke Anderson (3,475 votes) over Steve Webster (3,471 votes) in the race for a Cody area seat on the Northwest College Board of Trustees.

The other recount was requested by independent candidate Cindy Baldwin in her campaign against state Sen. Hank Coe, R-Cody, in the Senate District 18 race. In that recount of 10,480 ballots, four votes that were originally recorded as votes for Coe were recorded as under votes the second time around, perhaps because they weren’t marked very well, Baker said. That gave Coe a final victory of 5,678 votes with 4,256 votes for Baldwin (her total didn’t change).

Newsome was first elected to HD 24 in 2018 after incumbent Rep. Scott Court (R-Cody) declined to seek another term. In that race she received roughly 60% of the vote in the Republican primary against two opponents and took nearly 69% of the vote in defeating a Democrat in the general election.

In 2020, she went up against Court and Webber and won with 49% of the vote to 35% for Webber and 16% for Court.

Newsome, who currently serves on the Travel, Recreation and Wildlife and Education committees along with the Wyoming Gaming Commission, Park County Travel Council and other boards, is a longtime business owner in town, having once owned with her husband Bob, Sunlight Sports, Cowtown Candy and The Cody Theatre. 

Now, she’s ready to jump into her committee meetings.

“The work goes on,” she said. 

Webber is the Wyoming Republican National Committeewoman and president of the Wyoming Federation of Republican Women. She’ll be attending the next Republican State Committee meetings in September and said she expects a lot to come out of those.

“We have a lot of good candidates elected, hopefully they’ll prevail in the general,” she said. “I wish all the best to Sandy in the next two years, and I would like people to know I will never stop fighting for conservative values — we’ll see what happens going forward.”