Recount, demanded by opponent, confirms Sen. Coe's re-election

Posted 11/22/16

The recount started at 8 a.m. and wrapped up around 2:30 p.m., confirming that Coe had won an eighth term in the Senate.

Baldwin’s total of 4,256 votes did not change from the original results, while Coe lost four votes — his total dropping …

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Recount, demanded by opponent, confirms Sen. Coe's re-election

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A recount demanded by Senate District 18 candidate Cindy Baldwin and conducted by the Park County Clerk’s Office on Monday confirmed the essence of what voters were told on election night: Baldwin lost by more than 1,400 votes and roughly 14 percentage points to longtime state Sen. Hank Coe, R-Cody.

The recount started at 8 a.m. and wrapped up around 2:30 p.m., confirming that Coe had won an eighth term in the Senate.

Baldwin’s total of 4,256 votes did not change from the original results, while Coe lost four votes — his total dropping to 5,678. It narrowed the gap between them by .04 percent.

Baldwin — who ran as an independent in the contentious race — had alleged “fraud or error occurring in the count, returning or canvassing of the votes” when she requested the recount, though she indicated a large factor was that her supporters were simply skeptical of her loss.

Over the weekend, Baldwin said people who called and talked with her after the Nov. 8 election questioned not only the results of her race, but others — including the passage of the 1 cent specific purpose tax “when nobody said they were voting for it.”

Baldwin said several of the results “aren’t jiving with what I know,” but she emphasized that she requested the recount only at the urging of her supporters around the state and in other states.

“Given that so many people from so many different areas said, ‘you have to do this,’ I said I have nothing to lose, let’s just satisfy the people that are the naysayers and get it over and done with so we don’t have to hear this for three years,” Baldwin said. “Because I was about voice, choice and vote.”

After hearing of the new results, Baldwin said she continued to be “fine” with them, said she was glad to have requested the recount and said it could put to rest the concerns of the “naysayers.”

However, “being that they did it and it still came off — I mean, it was in my favor but it still wasn’t the correct recount of what they got the first time — shows me something is wrong possibly with our machines,” Baldwin said of the four-vote change, suggesting it might be time to buy new machines and software.

For his part, Coe said he wasn’t surprised that the recount confirmed the original results. Coe — who described himself as having a lot of faith in Park County’s local officials and Clerk Colleen Renner — also said he didn’t appreciate Baldwin’s allegations of possible fraud.

“Who are these people that question our local officials like that? You know, gosh, the last thing we have a problem with in Wyoming and particularly in Park County is any type of fraud or corruption,” Coe said. “I actually was offended by what they did. I hope the voters understand what these people are all about.”

At least for state-level races, this appeared to be the first candidate-requested recount in decades.

Wyoming law requires an automatic recount whenever the results are within 1 percentage point. Those are fairly common; Park County had one in this election that confirmed a narrow four-vote win for Luke Anderson to the Northwest College Board of Trustees.

When the gap is greater than 1 percent, however, the law says a candidate must allege fraud or error to get a recount. Those recounts are extremely rare.

The Wyoming Secretary of State’s Office has readily accessible elections data going back to 2000; over those nine primary and general elections — a time period that includes hundreds of races — Baldwin is the only state-level candidate to request a recount, according to a spokesman for the office.

Baldwin first tried asking for a recount on Tuesday, Nov. 15, submitting an affidavit that said she wanted to confirm all the votes had been correctly recorded.

“There was a ‘glitch’ in the system early on in the election process and then we went back online,” Baldwin wrote in part, adding, “There has been past times where votes were missed.”

That affidavit, however, was rejected by elections officials as being insufficient.

She then enlisted the help of Drake Hill, a Cheyenne attorney and the husband of former State Superintendent of Public Instruction Cindy Hill — a longtime Coe adversary. In a revised affidavit submitted shortly before a Friday deadline, Baldwin said a voting machine that temporarily went down in Cody may have caused errors and suggested the chain of custody for absentee ballots might have been broken. Baldwin also said the clerk may have “transposed” her name and Coe’s — suggesting Coe’s votes might have actually been hers.

Park County Elections Deputy Teecee Barrett said transposed results were “impossible” with the county’s elections software and that the machine did not process any ballots while it was malfunctioning.

To get ready for the recount, First Deputy Clerk Hans Odde said the clerk’s office ran sample ballots through the machines over the weekend for testing.

Baldwin, who was unhappy with the way she was treated by an employee in the clerk’s office last week, told the Tribune she documented many vehicles coming and going at the courthouse.

“Everybody was down here this weekend. Was that just getting ready for today?” Baldwin asked Renner at the start of Monday’s proceedings.

“I’ll make no comment on that,” Renner told the candidate.

One of Baldwin’s supporters began videotaping the proceedings on Monday morning, but Odde told her stop, citing legal advice.

Only media representatives and one observer representing each candidate — Terry Hinkle for Coe and Robert Sibley for Baldwin — were allowed into the room at the old jail where the recount took place.

Ten election judges from around the county were brought from the courthouse to the former jail and each stationed at a voting machine. There they dutifully fed the district’s nearly 10,500 ballots into the machines by hand; they were provided rubber thumbs and moisturizer to help keep the paper moving.

Once all the ballots had been run back through the machines, cards carrying the results from each machine were brought back over the courthouse and tabulated; a glitch with the elections software required the results to be read off paper slips printed by the machines.

After the final results were tabulated, one of the citizen elections judges, John Osgood of Cody, wondered if the similarity of the original and recounted results might mean fewer requests for recounts in the future.

“The recount gives validation not just to the number of votes Cindy Baldwin garnered but to the whole election procedure: it’s spot on,” Osgood said. He added that in the multiple elections he’s worked in Park County, he’s never seen even a hint of impropriety.

Baldwin had asked for the ballots to be counted by hand — which would have taken even longer — but Barrett said state law did not require the county to recount by hand.

Because the recount did not change the final results, Baldwin will be responsible for paying the first $500 of costs, but the county must cover the rest. Barrett said her office would likely have a calculation of that cost done today (Tuesday).

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