In preparation for next month’s primary election, Park County elections officials ran public tests of all of their voting equipment to be used at polling locations. It’s hardly news — the machines are tested before every election in accordance with state statutes. Yet this time, the tests drew a crowd.

About a dozen spectators assembled at the county elections office Thursday morning, filling the relatively small lobby with political leaders, candidates and those simply curious in the process. The interest in the voting machines event has grown since the 2020 election, alongside calls by some for hand counts on paper ballots and those having difficulty trusting digital technology in elections.

Park County Clerk and Chief Election Official Colleen Renner opened the event by welcoming the jovial crowd. She quickly handed the reins to Deputy Clerk Hans Odde, who escorted the group to the old jail, where the voting equipment is kept under lock and key and 24-hour video surveillance. Odde explained the testing procedure and patiently answered every question from those in attendance.

“I’ll take questions about general election things. We will not talk politics and will not talk about anything like that,” Odde cautioned the group.

Park County Republican Party Chairman Martin Kimmet, who has been to the past three tests, brought chocolate pastries for the group. “I should have brought two [dozen],” he joked after seeing the large gathering.

Kimmet knows the process well, and thinks it’s every citizen’s duty to be familiar with the process. “I think everybody should be here. You can’t complain about an election if you don’t know the facts. That’s like complaining about somebody who gets voted in if you don’t vote.”

Kimmet has attended previous tests and said he has never seen anything during the testing that raises “red flags.”

“I think as far as any machine, this is as good as it gets. But any computer can be hacked,” he said.

Larry French of Powell, a former Park County Republican Party chairman, agrees. Like many in his fold, French trusts county elections workers, but not the machines.

Both would like the state to revert to hand counting. “I voted in every election since I was 18 years old. And I’m not a young man anymore. A lot of those times were [hand-counted] paper ballots and we still got results in a timely fashion,” Kimmet said.

This isn’t Park County Commission Chairman Dossie Overfield’s first rodeo. She first started attending the tests in 2018, before running for office. As with Kimmet, she trusts the Park County vote.

“I’m amazed at how intricate the process is, and how well they do it. [The testing] answered a lot of my questions about how the machines handle the balances and how the totals are accumulated,” Overfield said. “I was impressed.”

Dan Schein, candidate for Cody city council in Ward 1, said he came because he was curious about the integrity of the county’s voting machines and to gauge for himself the validity of the current movement in Park County to go to hand ballot counting.

“I don’t believe that hand ballot counting is the way to go. And I wanted to confirm my own belief by seeing the integrity of these machines and the process that the county folks go through, to administer, maintain the system,” he said.

Schein believes area voters should have trust in their elections.

“I trust them. I believe we all should,” he said of the equipment. “These machines are not members of any political party. They’re not biased. They’re not racist. You know, I don’t know how you can get more independent. When someone is hand-counting the ballots, there’s always room there for fraud.”

He said those requesting hand counts are like a “solution in search of a problem.”

Based on population size, Schein said Park County could revert to hand counts without too many issues, but “I don’t think it would improve our election results. It just introduces the possibility for corruption and it’s something that we don’t want.”

Park County has about 17,000 voters, though Odde predicts a much smaller number of people will participate in the midterm election. 

“We’ve had a huge turnout in 2020 for the presidential election, and that’s kind of the way the cycle goes in Wyoming,” Odde said. “Presidentials get really high turnouts. Midterms are not as high [of a turnout].”

Park County uses “clam shell” voting stations made by Omaha, Nebraska-based Election Systems & Software. The machines do not have modems installed and each are set to only accept ballots from the specific precinct where they are stationed. For example, a Powell voter could not cast their ballot in Clark and vice versa. The county also uses separate voting machines to assist those with physical challenges, including sight and hearing impairments. Those machines are used to mark a ballot that is then printed out for the voter’s review. 

Each machine is backed up by batteries to run for at least six hours of normal voting, should electrical power fail.

Odde and other elections employees – all certified election judges – spent more than six hours testing the machinery on Thursday. Only French, Kimmet and one other attendee made it through to the end of the test.