In front of a partially skeptical audience, the Park County Clerk’s Office ran its elections equipment through two days of testing last week.

The mandatory tests were intended to ensure that the 14 electronic tabulators and six backups being used for the upcoming primary election are correctly reading every oval on the ballot. With Republicans, Democrats and independent and third party voters each getting ballots in the primary — along with different ballots for each precinct — there are 81 different variations for the county Aug. 18 election. That meant 2,528 pre-marked ballots were needed to check every box.

During the July 8-9 testing, “everything ran smoothly, everything ran clearly,” said Elections Deputy Katie Johnson. “No issues for any machine on any level, which is always nice to see.”

The mandatory testing was open to the public and about 14 people attended portions of the testing. That included some skeptics of the machines.

Differing opinions, legal and otherwise

Although a group of local residents have pushed for a hand count for years, Park County commissioners confirmed in April that this year’s results will be tabulated by machine, saying state statute requires electronic tabulators.

That conclusion is disputed by hand count advocates. In early May, Secretary of State Chuck Gray sent the commissioners a letter in which he reiterated his view that the board could order a hand count.

“We know we need hand tabulation,” Gray added at a June 4 meeting of the Park County Republican Party, telling the commissioners present that “the clear interpretation of Wyoming state law is that the county commissions can choose the method of tabulation.”

However, Park County Attorney Bryan Skoric advised the commissioners in 2022 that current state law actually prohibits counties from conducting a hand count.

“While Secretary Gray is certainly entitled to his opinion, it is important for the public to understand that he is not an attorney, the letter he provided is not from an attorney and commissioners have an obligation to make decisions based on legal guidance, not political pressure or rhetoric,” Commissioner Kelly Simone wrote on Facebook in response.

Trusting people or machines?

Those present at the beginning of the July 8 testing included Republican county clerk candidate Jimmy Rush, Republican county commission candidates and hand count advocates Tim Lasseter, Dan Laursen and Karin Richard and Park County Democratic Party Chair Ann Pasek.

Though the task at hand was to test and certify the electronic devices, some of the attendees offered their opinions on the machines’ merits.

“I don’t understand why there are some people saying, you know, ‘we have to hand count’ … or ‘there’s so much fraud in elections,’” said Jeanne Leske of Cody. “I’ve been working [on] election boards for 40 years, and … I’ve never seen anything but people upholding what they’re supposed to do.”

Leske later mentioned that she “would trust a machine over myself.”

The Park County Democratic Party platform specifically endorses “electronic vote counting” and party chair Pasek said counting votes is “just like cleaning strawberries.”

“Pretty soon, the green is in with the berries because the human brain doesn’t like boring, mundane tasks,” Pasek said. “That’s why there’s single car accidents. The human brain gets bored and drifts off.”

However, Lasseter told Pasek that “I would trust you to go count my vote before I would the machine.”

“No way,” Pasek responded, saying that the tabulator “is going to do it exactly the same, every time.”

“I don’t trust that as far as I can pick it up and throw it,” Lasseter countered.

Trouble down south

Lasseter specifically raised concerns about a miscount that occurred during a March 3 election in Newton County, Texas.

Newton County Clerk Sandra Duckworth has said that a DS450 tabulator manufactured by Election Systems & Software (ES&S) stopped working on election day.

Duckworth said she summoned an ES&S field technician, who traveled to her office and reprogrammed the machine. However, ES&S later discovered “that the programming for the ballots did not match the actual printed ballots, leading to skewed results,” Duckworth said in a statement. According to reporting by 12 News, the issue led to incorrect vote totals among the 348 Democratic ballots cast.

After the error was discovered, the ES&S machine was reprogrammed again, retested and the ballots retabulated; the corrected results were released on March 11.

The Park County Clerk’s Office also uses ES&S machines and “I don’t know that there’s any way for you guys to put anything in place to stop that from happening,” Lasseter told office staff at last week’s testing.

Lasseter said he’d spoken to Duckworth and “they were adamant about that they had done nothing wrong, and that they had done what they were supposed to.”

First Deputy Park County Clerk Hans Odde said last week’s testing was meant to prevent issues like those that popped up in Newton County. Odde also noted that the Park County Clerk’s Office staff programs its own elections rather than outsourcing the task to ES&S; it was the company’s programming that reportedly caused the problem in Newton County.

In Park County, staff perform that work on a secured computer in the office that is not connected to the internet, deputy clerk Johnson explained, “and only having that [election] software on it, I have to very implicitly tell it what are our parameters for each election, what race, what candidates, etc., etc.”

While it puts more responsibility on the clerk’s office, Johnson said it also enables them to check the information and programming along the way and quickly catch and fix any errors.

“From step a to step z, we’re there and we’re verifying and double-checking every step,” Johnson said in a Wednesday interview. She thinks the local programming “provides us with a much better outcome.”

Clerk candidate weigh in

At a Monday candidate forum hosted by the Cody Country Chamber of Commerce, the two county clerk candidates — Rush and Odde — were asked for their positions on electronic tabulation versus hand counting.

“I’m not advocating for hand counting. We have electronic tabulation machines,” Rush said.

However, Rush added that he has a concern that “we don’t have the access to the machines that we should have to verify them properly.”

If elected, he said he’ll work “to ensure that we have integrity in our voting machines and that we can count on the tabulators to do exactly what they’re supposed to do.”

As for Odde, the longtime clerk and deputy clerk has been working with ES&S technology since 2006, “and I’m all for electronic tabulators,” he said.

However, Odde also said he’s “excited” the state is performing a partial hand audit this year. A bill passed by the Wyoming Legislature during its winter Budget Session requires counties to hand count at least 5% of the total ballots cast and compare the results to those tabulated by the machine(s).

“I think that that is going to be an integrity piece that the public can look at and actually say, ‘Hey, these things work the way they’re supposed to work,’” Odde said, adding that, “It is absolutely going to, I believe, prove up what we already know, and that the tabulators are accurate.”

Laursen, who is a current state senator, sponsored a different measure in the session that would have completely switched the state to hand-counted elections, but it failed introduction on a 9-22 vote.

During last week’s testing of the machines, Richard asked Odde what steps he’d taken to avoid any perception of having a conflict of interest, since he’s in a contested race for clerk.

Odde said that’s been a topic of discussion within the office and with the county attorney, as the question had previously been raised by Park County Republican Party Chairman Vince Vanata. 

According to Odde, Skoric relayed that the first deputy still needs to do his job, but he’s also distanced himself from parts of the election process. For instance, Odde said he’ll have nothing to do with tabulating ballots, won’t be involved with the board that handles absentee ballots and won’t be stationed at the Park County Fairgrounds on election day as he has in the past.

“I’ll be … hands off,” Odde said, “and I’ll be waiting with you guys for the results.”