Teton County retests election equipment nearly a week out from primary

JACKSON — Teton County Clerk Maureen Murphy and her election staff spent Tuesday retesting electronic election equipment after a dispute in Laramie County caused statewide concern.

Secretary of State Chuck Gray sent a letter to county clerks Monday requesting that each and every county that failed to comply with guidance on public testing of voting equipment retest each voting system they intended to use in the 2024 primary election.

He also asked for a copy of the summary and detail reports for all races from both the original test and the retest.

“The problem was not isolated to Laramie County,” Gray said in a prepared statement Monday. “Multiple counties failed to assign a different number of valid votes to each candidate for their test ballots, as evidenced in their summary and detail reports.”

Reports showed some counties did not assign a different number of valid votes to each candidate for an office during the public testing, as required by state statute.

For example, in Goshen County, candidates for U.S. Senate in the Republican primary each had 40 votes cast for them in the test. The electronic machine counted the votes correctly, but the issue lies with the fact that there were not different vote amounts for each candidate.

“This requirement is not just a formality,” Gray said. “It is crucial to ensuring that the electronic voting machines are accurately counting and tabulating the votes for each candidate when the actual ballots are tabulated on election night.”

In Teton County, Murphy said she decided to retest the machines before Gray sent his letter.

She found two candidates in her first test deck that had exactly the same number of votes, and she updated the new test deck with different ballots and write-ins so that there would not be equal amounts of votes.

She was not concerned at all with the results of the first test or that the equipment wasn’t reading the ballots properly.

“They tested correctly,” she said.

Platte County Clerk Malcolm Ervin told the Wyoming Tribune Eagle that several county clerks retested voting machines out of an abundance of caution.

“It certainly adds stress, even for those counties whose tests did go well, that did comport with statute,” Ervin said. “There’s a narrative that our equipment failed. And truth be told, the equipment did not fail. The equipment did what it was supposed to do.”

The problem is that the tests were set up incorrectly by giving some candidates the same vote totals. Having different vote totals for each candidate helps ensure the machines are accurately reading the marks on the ballot for each candidate, according to the clerks.

Retesting the machines so close to the primary does have its challenges, Murphy said. More than 685 ballots in the test deck provided by the equipment company have to run through each machine.

However, she said Teton County has it easier than more rural counties that have already sent their ballot counting machines out to polling stations.

“They’ve been sealed for two weeks,” she said. “We were ready to go, and now we have to unseal, redo all of our pages for election judges — it’s just a process.”

Murphy was joined Tuesday morning by Teton County GOP Chair Mary Martin, who attended the first equipment test last month, and Teton County Democratic Party Chair Maggie Hunt. Rep. Mike Yin, D-Jackson, also attended. They sat in the basement of the Teton County Administration Building and waited hours for the machines to go through the process.

None of them was worried about election integrity in Teton County.

“I’m quite confident that Teton County’s testing of the machine is accurate,” Martin said. “This was precipitated because of a situation that was observed in another county, and so I’m really pleased that as exceptionally busy as our county employees are, they are making an effort to assure all of the voters in Teton County that our election is safe and accurate.”

The Laramie County GOP filed a complaint with the Wyoming Secretary of State’s Office on Aug. 6, and the Wyoming GOP filed a separate lawsuit against Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee on Aug. 8 after the test used the same vote totals for candidates instead of assigning each candidate a different number.

Lee told WyoFile in a statement that the test detected “no errors” and that the legal complaint sought to “disrupt our current primary election and force my office to provide alternative means for counting ballots.”

In the past week, the Wyoming GOP has sent out a series of emails saying that errors in testing are casting doubt on the accuracy of Wyoming’s primary election and jeopardizing the general election. The emails include a button that says “count me in,” which links to a request for donations.

Despite the urgent emails, Martin isn’t alarmed and remains confident in Teton County’s election integrity.

“I think that’s coming from the anxiety level of a handful of people that are overzealous on their committee,” Martin said.

Martin never questioned the process or the counting of ballots when she lost the County Commission race a few cycles ago, she said.

“It seems to me sometimes this comes from people that were so sure they were going to win and they didn’t,” she added.

Democratic Chair Hunt was equally confident in Teton County’s system and defended the integrity of elections statewide. There’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud in Wyoming, she said.

“I feel like our state has other issues that should be addressed,” Hunt said. “It’s unfortunate. It’s causing anxiety where it shouldn’t be, and it’s taking people away from work they should be doing.”

This story was published on August 15, 2024.