Election results now official

The primary election results are now official, with no changes necessary from the preliminary numbers that were released on election night itself.

In contested seats, John D. Davis beat incumbent Kelly Dennis to the Republican nomination for county commissioner by 999 votes to 741.

Harriet Hageman retained the nomination for U.S. Representative and John Barrasso was Crook County’s Republican choice to retain his U.S. Senate seat.

“We didn’t have any automatic recounts,” says County Clerk Melissa Jones. “There’s a formula and it has to be a certain percent to [trigger a] recount.”

This formula requires that the margin between two candidates is less than 1% of the votes cast for the winning candidate.

Due to the number of candidates, it was possible for voters to nominate a write-in candidate for one seat each on the Pine Haven and Moorcroft councils.

“We only had one write-in that qualified,” Jones says. “For the municipalities, the rules say that the write-in candidates have to have at least three votes to qualify.”

The successful write-in candidate was Casey Devish for the Moorcroft council.

Devish has already been verified as a qualified candidate and notified. To accept the nomination, says Jones, he will need to visit town hall and complete the application.

This year’s primary saw a relatively low turnout, with just 48% of Crook County’s voters heading to the polls – a total of 1891 ballots cast.

This compares to a turnout of 67% in 2022, when considerably more local seats were up for election, and 70% in 2020.

Crook County currently has 3865 voters, 89 of whom registered on election day. This number is similar to the 3842 registered voters for 2020’s primary, but a drop from the 4558 in 2022.

Unsurprisingly, the number of absentee ballots cast this year dropped to 275. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, 827 people chose to vote remotely; by 2022, this had dropped to 525.

The post-election audit was also successfully completed by the canvas board. This check is performed using a random sampling of ballots selected by the Wyoming Secretary of State’s Office.

“On election night, we have to export the ballot numbers to the state and they send us a report back saying which ballots we need to review,” Jones says. “We reviewed all those ballots and we didn’t have any errors.”