Election turnout extremely high

Last week’s election saw an impressive turnout in Crook County, with more voters casting their ballots than County Clerk Linda Fritz has seen before in her 22 years of working for the county. A total of 4143 people voted, representing 91% of the county’s voters, with 1651 of them doing so through absentee methods.

A huge turnout plus high numbers of absentee votes plus the challenges of new voting machines plus the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic could have been a recipe for disaster – but on the night, exactly the opposite happened.

Across the United States, ballots were still being counted days after the election. But in Crook County, where everything went relatively smoothly, “We had all the results in and done by 9:30 p.m., which is really good,” says County Clerk Linda Fritz.

Particularly startling this year was the number of votes Crook County gathered through absentee methods. A grand total of 1651 ballots were received early, either mailed or cast at the absentee polling station within the courthouse, which was a 96% return rate.

This is double the usual number of absentee voters. During the 2016 presidential election, by contrast, 817 people cast their votes early.

Unusually, many of this year’s early ballots were cast at the courthouse. During a normal election year, the number of people who take advantage of the absentee polling place is very low; Fritz estimates that somewhere around 30 are collected via this method.

This year, 455 of the 1651 absentee ballots were cast at the absentee polling place as members of the community made the choice to vote early, but in person.

“I don’t know that we anticipated how busy we were going to be in the office, but we were just slammed,” she says.

The early voting made things easier at the polls, for both the judges and voters on Election Day, but “it made it ten times as hard for our office, keeping up that pace every single day on top of our regular duties,” says Fritz.

By the end of November 3, the votes of 4143 members of the Crook County community had been tallied and released. But while such a smooth election is certainly something to celebrate, it was harder work behind the scenes than it may have appeared.

Elections begin in March for the county clerk and her staff, which is when publishing begins, contact is made with the entities that need to put positions on the ballot and polling places need to be booked. This year, just as the process began, COVID-19 was thrown into the mix.

It made everything more difficult than usual, said Fritz – and this year was already expected to be tricky because it was also the first time election staff made use of the new voting machines.

“Getting the machines deployed, learning them and training everybody to use them was another factor,” Fritz says. As the president of the County Clerks’ Association of Wyoming, she was deeply involved in that process.

And then, of course, there’s the pandemic, which added challenges including, “Having to prep for social distancing, changing my polling places and adding personal protective gear like crazy, and then the huge influx of people coming in to vote in person at the courthouse at the absentee polling place.”

Despite all this, Fritz says, Election Day itself flowed pretty smoothly. She credits the hard work of her staff and election volunteers for this fact.

“We had a couple of small glitches, like that we ran out of voter registration forms at some of the polling places because of the turnout,” she says.

“We had judges have to back out at the last minute because they were quarantined or COVID-19 positive or for family emergencies. We were kind of scrambling at the last minute to find enough judges but everybody did tremendously well at the polls and the judges were fantastic.”