11:12 a.m. on 11/8. Another whoops here. After looking at the numbers in the Cody Enterprise today, I realized I mischaracterized the absentee results with regard to the Cody Mayor's race. The absentee ballots did not "really narrow" the results between Mayor Nancy Tia Brown and challenger Karen Ballinger. Brown did not do as well among those final ballots as she did among the earlier ones, but she actually gained two votes out of the 1,214 ballots that came in late. By my math, Brown received 608 votes to Ballinger's 606 -- boosting her from an 84-vote margin of victory to an 86-vote one. Sorry for the error.
2:02 a.m. Whoops. As I was driving back to Powell, I realized that after waiting all night for Meeteetse results, I forgot to post the outcome of the race for area's seat on the Northwest College Board of Trustees: Nada Larsen took 306 votes (60.6%) to Winfred Orrell's 153 (30.3%) to coast into that seat.
OK, now I think (and hope) I'm finished. Have a good night!
1:10 a.m. Not sure if anyone's still with me, but if so, we're finally done. In the races I've been tracking (including the Powell and Cody school board races) no results changed with the last batch of results, which came from the South Fork, Meeteetse and absentee voters. The only notable thing I caught is that the absentees really narrow the Cody Mayor's race -- incumbent Nancy Tia Brown appears to have won re-election by 86 votes out of 4,881 cast.
You can check out the full results now up on the county's webpage in summary or detailed form. Park County was the last of Wyoming's 23 counties to report results to the Secretary of State's office.
We'll have detailed coverage with reactions in Thursday's Tribune. Thanks to everyone who followed along!
12:15 a.m. Still working on those last absentee ballots.
11:56 p.m. We're hoping for less than 15 minutes now, though the beep-beep-beeps signal that absentee ballots keep jamming.
11:41 p.m. Here's what Powell's updated numbers did for the races we've been tracking. As a side note, I apparently lost my mind earlier while posting the percentage of the vote picked up by Commission Candidate Lee Livingston. He was at 30.5% of the vote -- not 48.3%. Sorry about that. I've fixed it below. He's at 29.83% now.
One cent tax
Against - 5,486 (58%)
For - 3,694 (39.1%)
Lodging tax
For - 7,396 (78.3%)
Against - 1,767 (18.7%)
Park County Commission
Lee Livingston - 5,637 votes (29.8%)
Bucky Hall - 4,962 votes (26.3%)
Pat Slater - 3,372 votes (17.9%)
Powell School Board
Lynn Stutzman - 1,609 votes (12.6%)
Rob McCray - 1,403 votes (10.9%)
Lisa Barrus - 1,348 votes (10.4%)
Dave Brown - 1,224 votes (9.4%)
Raquel Schwab - 1,196 votes (9.3%)
Jeff Easum - 1,094 votes (8.4%)
Greg Imhoff - 674 votes (5.2%)
Todd Voller - 381 votes (2.9%)
Alan Horner - 374 votes (2.9%)
NWC Board Powell
Jim Vogt - 2,096 (48.3%)
Martin Garhart - 1,509 (34.8%)
Races unaffected by the new Powell numbers (a re-posting)
Senate District 18
Hank Coe - 3,890 (64.8%)
Write-ins - 1,474 (24.5%)
Powell City Council Ward 3
Josh Shorb - 395 (57.5%)
Amber Yager - 203 (29.6%)
NWC Board Cody
Mark Westerhold - 3,083 (30.4%)
Paul Fees - 1,978 (19.5%)
Bob Newsome - 1,848 (18.2%)
Nothing yet for NWC Board Meeteetse
Powell Fire District Director 4
Scott Heny - 508 (54.1%)
Samuel Rodriguez - 318 (33.9%)
Cody Mayor
Nancy Tia Brown - 1,716 (48.3%)
Karen Ballinger - 1,632 (45.9%)
11:20 p.m. We're still lacking 4,000 absentee ballots, Meeteetse and the South Fork.
"Hopefully, we'll be done within an hour," said First Deputy Mike Demoney said. He said part of the issue is that there are so many absentees ballots -- particularly in the South Fork area, where some 500 absentee votes were cast.
"They're going to have over 100 percent (turnout) in that precinct, I can almost guarantee it," Demoney said.
The new numbers that just came in were for two city of Powell precincts. As I said, they didn't flip any races. I'll post updated detailed numbers for the Powell races in just a minute.
11:18 p.m. New numbers in, but it doesn't look like they change any results. The new totals wrap up Powell voting -- except for however many Powell ballots that are among the 4,000 absentees from all over the county. There were actually two Powell precincts missing (my bad) from the earlier results. In the one race that appeared possibly open to a change, the Powell school board contest, Stutzman, McCray and Barrus continue to lead. Brown now trails Barrus by 124 votes instead of 106 for that third seat on the board.
11:02 p.m. Someone asked who paid to fly out the two folks from the Secretary of State's office and the equipment manufacturer. I don't know the answer to that one, but I can ask that when I get some more detail tomorrow.
10:57 p.m. Someone asked why the county isn't posting numbers on their website. Actually, if everything's working for you like it is for me, you should be able to find the figures here as a summary by clicking here or with precinct-level detail by clicking here. I'm not sure if they've got an ETA on wrapping things up; I'll go check.
10:52 p.m. One more race that could potentially shift is the Cody school board. They've got 11 (yes, 11) candidates running for four seats. Stephanie Bell (2,145 votes), Jake Fulkerson (1,673 votes), Daniel White (1,598 votes) and Julie Snelson (1,567 votes) lead Justin Powell (1,429 votes). The other six candidates appear out of the running at this point.
10:48 p.m. To recap what we're waiting on: ballots from the western part of the city of Powell, the three Meeteetse area precincts, the South Fork, the area north of Cody (I was wrong in saying earlier it was the North Fork) and more than 4,000 absentee ballots from all around the county. I think there's only a limited number of races still in play (most specifically the Powell school board, where Jeff Easum, Raquel Schwab and Dave Brown trail Lynn Stutzman, Rob McCray and Lisa Barrus), but I'm just guessing.
In case you were wondering, it looks like Constitutional Amendments A & B, relating to Wyomingites' rights to control their own health care and to hunt, trap and fish, will pass overwhelmingly. Constitutional Amendment C, which would let court-appointed commissioners to handle more judicial business, may very well fail by a narrow margin. Statewide figures are here.
10:39 p.m. Just saw a question down below asking about how many absentees are left to be counted (sorry, it got trapped in my spam box!). "Could make a huge difference in all races!" they wrote. Indeed, there are a lot of ballots out there: more than 4,000 (couldn't get an exact number right away, but it's less than 4,200). It is possible that the absentee ballots will come in vastly different than the folks who voted today, though if I remember right, that wasn't the case in the primary. But yeah, in a close race, it could easily make a difference. And who knows what the tabulations will reveal.
10:33 p.m. Since there are still ballots out there to be counted, I think the question on everyone's mind is, "Could these results change?" Having taken a breath, here's my analysis of what races are still even remotely in play right now: two of the Powell school board seats (Lynn Stutzman appears to have a real good handle on one), the NWC Cody area seat being sought by Paul Fees and Bob Newsome and the Cody Mayor's race. Of those, the Powell school board is probably the most susceptible to a change, but even that's not necessarily going to happen.
I'd say everything else I've been reporting on is almost certainly out of reach.
We still have no results on the Meeteetse NWC race (as we don't have those troublesome Meeteetse ballots tabulated yet).
10:10 p.m. (fixed the precincts) You probably noticed that we only have 22 of 29 precincts reporting. So what's missing? It's primarily the precincts where there was ballot machine trouble: the South Fork and Meeteetse. But we also need one more from the city of Powell and the area north of Cody. Also, and perhaps most significantly, none of the absentees have been included. So some things could still change in the close races.
9:58 p.m. Whoops, left off the contested Powell fire race.
Powell Fire District Director 4
Scott Heny - 508 (54.1%)
Samuel Rodriguez - 318 (33.9%)
A couple other races of note:
Cody Mayor
Nancy Tia Brown - 1,716 (48.3%)
Karen Ballinger - 1,632 (45.9%)
Lodging tax
For - 6,806 (78.5%)
Against - 1,621 (18.7%)
9:53 p.m. Detail on those results. Bear in mind the percentages are a little off and that we're missing seven precincts, including Meeteetse.
One cent tax
Against - 5,115 (59%)
For - 3,326 (38.4%)
Park County Commission
Lee Livingston - 5,291 votes (30.5%)
Bucky Hall - 4,596 votes (26.5%)
Pat Slater - 3,029 votes (17.5%)
Senate District 18
Hank Coe - 3,890 (64.8%)
Write-ins - 1,474 (24.5%)
Powell City Council Ward 3
Josh Shorb - 395 (57.5%)
Amber Yager - 203 (29.6%)
Powell School Board
Lynn Stutzman - 1,349 votes (12.6%)
Rob McCray - 1,160 votes (10.9%)
Lisa Barrus - 1,107 votes (10.4%)
Dave Brown - 1,001 votes (9.4%)
Raquel A Schwab - 987 (9.3%)
Jeff Easum - 912 votes (9.4%)
Three others have 546 votes or fewer
NWC Board Powell
Jim Vogt - 1,740 (48.9%)
Martin Garhart - 1,176 (33.1%)
NWC Board Cody
Mark Westerhold - 3,083 (30.4%)
Paul Fees - 1,978 (19.5%)
Bob Newsome - 1,848 (18.2%)
Nothing yet for NWC Board Meeteetse
9:35 p.m. Here come results. This reflects 22 of 29 precincts. Quick takes: it's looking good for:
Bucky Hall and Lee Livingston in the Park County Commission race
Jim Vogt in the Powell NWC race; Mark Westerhold has a lock on re-election for a Cody NWC seat, while Paul Fees is leading Bob Newsome by about 140 vote for the second Cody NWC seat
Lynn Stutzman, Rob McCray and Lisa Barrus on the Powell school board
Scott Heny on the Fire Board
Josh Shorb on the Powell council.
It's looking really good for the lodging tax and bad for the 1-cent tax.
Senator Hank Coe is doing quite well, significantly outpacing write-in votes that are presumably going to Tea Party candidate Bob Berry. Cody Mayor Nancy Tia Brown has a small lead over challenger Karen Ballinger.
However, things can change as more results are tabulated. More detail in a minute.
9:24 p.m. Don't have results here yet, but updated results in Big Horn County show an even worse picture for their proposed special purpose tax (it's a proposed sixth-cent): just 30.8 percent voting in favor with 69.2 opposed. That's worse than how the West Park cap tax fared here in Park County two years ago. Of course, it's possible that the Big Horn County results aren't really applicable to the proposed fifth-cent tax here. We'll hopefully find out soon.
9:16 p.m. "They're really close," said Park County Clerk Jerri Torczon of the status of staff working on tabulating results. The clerk's office just told a caller that they're hoping for 15-20 minutes. Torczon was re-feeding the Meeteetse ballot into a machine when I spoke to her. "It just seems to take forever," she said. Torczon also said the results may all be released at once.
9:07 p.m. Fremont County voters are also mulling a proposed 1-cent tax tonight, but it doesn't look like they have any results posted online just yet.
9 p.m. While we wait for Park County, here's a look at election action in Big Horn County that may interest folks. In unofficial, incomplete Big Horn County results, a proposed sixth-cent of sales tax there is failing, 829 votes for to 1,373 against. That's just 37.8 percent of voters in favor of the tax. That could bode poorly for the fifth-cent proposal here if voters here were in a similar mood. In other news that could be relevant to Park County, Republican Nathan Winters leads Democrat Connie Skates 847 votes to 158 in House District 28. In addition to southern Big Horn County, that district also includes Meeteetse and a part of Fremont County. Constitutional Amendents A & B (about health care and hunting rights, respectively) are passing overwhelmingly, while C is also passing.
8:49 p.m. In some good news, all of the ballots have arrived here at the Park County Courthouse and have been checked in for processing. "The absentees are still being counted, but all the boxes are here," said Tami Keehn of the clerk's office. In some mostly useless news, it being past 8:40 p.m. means this will be the latest that first results have been made available in a while.
8:37 p.m. Clerk Jerri Torczon just stopped by to visit with the media folks here. "They're still working on it. Sorry," she said. Torczon described the hold-up as being a problem with two voting machines' cards that aren't working correctly. Those two cards are throwing things off, Torczon said. She said it may be tied to reprogramming that had to be done earlier. Sorry for the rough explanation, but I'll have to sort out details tomorrow, when everybody has more time to chat and things have been sorted out. For now, we'll wait a bit more. "Hopefully just a while," Torczon said.
8:30 p.m. Powell's ballots have arrived here. No results yet. No ETA.
8:20 p.m. Elections staff are working their tails off to get results tabulated. I have seen their frenzied efforts firsthand. Meanwhile, the Casper Star Tribune just reported that "recounts" are required with the machines that were incorrectly processing ballots in the South Fork and Meeteetse areas earlier today. I just checked with a very busy First Deputy Mike Demoney who clarified that recount, in this sense, means only that: the ballots are going to be re-run through the machines. It's not a recount in the Florida 2000 sense of counting ballots by hand and squinting election judges trying to determine voters' intent. Ballots are still continuing to file in, including just-arrived ones from Clark.
8:14 p.m. Despite not a single result having been tabulated from Park County, Wyoming's races have already been called for Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., and U.S. Rep. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo. I'm trying to get an update on what's going on here.
7:53 p.m. No results yet. Sorry. But when they are available, they'll not only be available here, but also on the county's elections webpage. Last time, the Tribune got and posted the results before the county had them up, but it depends on the election. At the state level, results can be found on the the Secretary of State's site. They'll be the slowest in posting Park County's results.
7:47 p.m. One thing to remember while we wait: it will almost certainly be Cody area results we receive first. We'll likely get a good idea about how the Park County Commission race is going and how the 1-cent and lodging taxes are faring, but we'll have to wait on any results for, say, the Powell school board race. For now, we wait on all the races.
7:42 p.m. Hello from the Park County Courthouse, where ballots are beginning to arrive for processing and counting. Clerk Jerri Torczon said four or five precincts' ballots are already here, but none have been run through the machines just yet.
Though predicting voter turnout early on election day is a risky, uncertain business, the early prediction here in Park County is that turnout today has been strong. The Park County Clerk's office printed enough ballots to cover 130 percent turnout, and First Deputy Mike Demoney said earlier today that it appears turnout was approaching that figure in some areas.
Demoney used phrases like "wow" in describing the need to print more ballots and form, specifically describing running out of voter registration forms. It's the registration of new voters (and no, not dead voters rising from the grave) that boosts turnout over 100 percent. That's because turnout is calculated based on the number of votes cast divided by the number of voters registered prior to today. And yes, 130 percent is a really, really cautious figure (Teton County printed 105 percent and ran out in some precincts today, the Jackson Hole News and Guide reports).
7 p.m. Good evening! The polls are closing here in Park County.
For those of you dying to start seeing the results, you're probably wondering: when are we going to start getting results, and when will things wrap up tonight?
Park County Clerk Jerri Torczon indicated earlier today that absentee-counting could go late tonight. There's no way to know for sure what will happen until we get there, but here's how results came in and wrapped up over the last five elections:
| First results | Last results | |
|---|---|---|
| 2008 Primary | 8:14 p.m. | 9:41 p.m. |
| 2008 General | 8:10 p.m. | 10:00 p.m. |
| 2010 Primary | 8:40 p.m. | 10:45 p.m. |
| 2010 General | 7:53 p.m. | 8:49 p.m. |
| 2012 Primary | 8:26 p.m. | 11:38 p.m. |
There have been some problems today with machines today in Park County. Voting machines in the South Fork and the Meeteetse areas each ran into trouble reading ballots today (we'll give you the more detailed explanation of the reasons why in Thursday's Tribune). Long story short, the clerk's office got the South Fork machine squared away this afternoon, but the one in Meeteetse is still having problems. The issues prompted the Secretary of State's Office to fly a technician and a staffer from Cheyenne to Cody this afternoon, the Casper Star Tribune reported. From the Star Tribune:
Deputy Secretary of State Pat Arp told (reporter Joan) Barron she sent the two employees as a precaution because of the tight presidential election and a sensitive Cody state Senate race. Arp said they probably can just reset and test the machines.
I'll get started in earnest around 7:30 p.m. In the meantime, here are a couple ground rules for what I'll be posting tonight:
-- Since it's assumed that Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney, U.S. Sen. John Barrasso and U.S. Rep. Cynthia Lummis will win Park County, I'll only be posting percentages for those races. (That should allow me to get to the in-doubt contests more quickly.)
--Unless something weird happens, I won't be mentioning results for these uncontested races. You can pretty much put these folks in the book as winners right now. An asterisk (*) denotes incumbents.
Powell City Council
Mayor: Don Hillman
Ward I: Jim Hillberry* and Eric Paul*
Ward II: Floyd Young*
State Legislature
House District 24: Sam Krone*, R-Cody
House District 25: Dave Blevins, R-Powell
House District 26: Elaine Harvey*, R-Lovell
House District 50: David Northrup, R-Powell
Special Districts
Powell Valley Hospital Board: Bonita Katz, Deb Kleinfeldt* and Larry Parker*
Powell Fire District 2 Director: Roger Easum*
Crown Hill Cemetery District: Judy Jones*, Ben Keller* and Bill Metzler*
Powell-Clarks Fork Conservation District: Floyd Derry* and Shane Smith*
CJ - just noticed the comment about NO absentees counted yet. How many are there??? Could make a huge difference in all races!
ReplyDeleteStill wondering how many absentee ballots are not included in any of the results
ReplyDeleteCJ, what would we do without you?! THANK YOU for the great coverage, as usual.
ReplyDeleteDo you know why the Park County Elections website is not reporting any numbers yet? Also, what time are they going to call it quits for the night? Thanks!
ReplyDeleteIn yor first entry you said the state flew people to help. Who pays for that?
ReplyDeleteClicked on your links, but the PC Elections website still shows no numbers/results for either the precincts deatils or the summary. Thanks again, sure must be a long day for all. Please let Geri know that she is doing a great job despite the mechanical setbacks.
ReplyDeleteObviously Jerri is not doing a great job considering she programmed the election incorrectly AND isn't updating the Elections website with the results. In fact, she's not doing doing her job at all!
DeleteHey Anonymous, have you tried refreshing the page, like doing a full reload? That's done the trick for me on that site before.
ReplyDeleteTried refreshing, and reloading no workie work. The primary results show up fine, but then we know those results. Thanks again, any word on what time they are shutting down for the night.
ReplyDeleteThanks CJ for sticking with it. Will check your updates in the morning.
ReplyDelete