The general election is on Nov. 5, and many Wyomingites are already early or absentee voting. Wyoming Public Media’s Managing Editor Nicky Ouellet spoke with Converse County Clerk Karen Rimmer about how things are going – and all the “how do I” and “what if’s” voters might have as they prepare to cast their ballot.
Editor’s note: This interview was edited lightly for brevity and clarity.
Nicky Ouellet: We're about two weeks out from election day and I'm curious: What's been working smoothly? And what are your biggest challenges or concerns so far?
Karen Rimmer: Overall, it has gone smoothly, and I have to attribute a lot of that to just having really great staff. We also have a really great group of election judges. It was a little rough before the primary due to the issues with the public testing, but we did retest.
NO: The national headlines that I've been reading, there's been a lot of misinformation and maybe just confusion about how elections are done. It varies state by state. Are you hearing some of those concerns locally?
KR: Oh, yes. We always do. I think a lot of it is confusion. Partly because I don't think maybe some voters realize that it is different by state, and I feel like Wyoming has some really good laws in place.
NO: I'm hoping to better understand how the process works. Let's say I'm registering to vote. How do you ensure that your list of voters is up to date and that I'm not voting if I shouldn't be?
KR: When anyone registers to vote for the first time, or if they have moved to Converse County from another county or another state, they do have to register to vote. There's certain I.D. requirements that have to be met in order to register someone to vote. Wyoming does not have residency laws, but we do have the registration form, which is a state form. Basically that person is attesting and they're swearing that this is who they are.
There's questions on there: Are you a felon? Or are you a felon who's had your voting rights restored? Are you a citizen? There's also things we look at on the I.D. itself to help to determine if that person is a citizen. But then with our WyoReg system, which is administered by the Secretary of State's office, the WyoReg system is tied into Social Security Administration, DCI [Division of Criminal Investigation], Vital Records [with the Health Department], and with the Wyoming Driver's License Office with WYDOT [Wyoming Department of Transportation].
When someone[’s] information is entered, WyoReg will alert whoever's using the system that this person may be a felon, or this person may not be a U.S. citizen, for example. But here's something to consider too is that in Wyoming, you can register to vote with an out of state driver's license. Since there are no residency requirements, that address on the driver's license at this particular time isn't what we look at. We are using the address that the voter gives us on that registration form, and they're swearing to us that that is their address.
NO: So how do you make sure that person isn't voting in both states?
KR: That's one of the questions on the registration form, too. I'm going to pull one up here real quick. They're swearing that they haven't voted in another state or county. Now, if they are moving to any county within Wyoming from one county to another, if they have an active ballot, we'll see that because the WyoReg system will tell us that. We pull up that voter and it would say in red, “active ballot.” So we would know that that person already had a ballot issued to them. But if it's from out of state, we might not necessarily know that immediately. So that is something that we have to contend with.
NO: When is the last day that I can register to vote, and how and where would I do that?
KR: By Wyoming law, 14 days prior to any election, if you register to vote you have to cast your ballot at the same time. So if you're in a county where they have early absentee voting, like here, where you can come in and actually cast your ballot in the clerk's office, you would have to vote that day. In Wyoming, you can register to vote on election day and vote at the polls. I know every state doesn't have that, but Wyoming does.
NO: How do I know that my ballot and my choices will be secret?
KR: The absentee ballots, they have a life cycle. Only the voter can request them. We will only mail it to your voter registration address. Then once we get it back, absentee ballots have a barcode on them. We have a tool where we can scan those in and they're binked into our WyoReg system and your ballot is considered received. It's not processed until we physically open those and run them into a tabulation machine. The public can attend and there's rules for observing and that kind of thing, one of which is no one can be within 10 feet of those ballots when we open them.
We have an absentee team. All those people have to be certified and they have to swear an oath they're going to uphold the law. We sort the envelopes by precinct. Then when we open them, we keep the envelopes, but we just turn the ballots over. Bear in mind we're processing hundreds, and some counties process thousands, of absentee ballots. We don't have time to look and see what people have voted. We don't care.
NO: Are there any reasons that my ballot wouldn't be counted?
KR: Yeah, there's a few. One, and the biggest one is, is you don't get it to us in time.
NO: No extended deadlines.
KR: No extended deadlines. It is 7 p.m. [on Nov. 5]. If you're in line at the polls, you do get to vote. The other way would be if you voted absentee and you didn't sign the envelope, because that is a requirement. If we get one in and we see that it's not signed, we'll call them and say, ‘Hey, you have to come in and sign your absentee ballot envelope.’ But if we were unable to get ahold of someone, we would not be able to count that ballot.
NO: What if I start marking for one candidate, change my mind and mark another candidate for the same race?
KR: If it's an overvote, the machine will tell you that you have overvoted this particular race. And then it will ask you, ‘Do you want to return the ballot or do you want to cast it?’ If you cast it, the rest of your ballot counts, but that particular race will not count.
NO: And what about the flip side? If I don't like any candidates for a district and I don't vote for them.
KR: That is totally fine. You do not have to vote for all of any measure or candidate or the number that are available. Undervotes do not negate any portion of a ballot. In fact, some people submit, believe it or not, completely blank ballots just because they want voter history.
NO: What if my child colors on my ballot after I have voted and I still want to send it in?
KR: If your child colors on a ballot, you have a couple of options. One, you can go ahead and send it in. We get it. When we go to open our absentee ballots, we'll see that. But we don't have any option but to run it. There's a possibility that the machine might not accept it. It might say something like ‘unreadable marks.’ Especially if your child colored on the timing marks around the ballot. That's just a safety measure to make sure people can't create fake ballots, if you will. We would probably have to spoil that ballot. You'd get voter history, but none of your votes would be counted. That would be my guess.
The better option for you would be to call us and say, ‘Hey, my child colored all over my ballots. Can I get a new one?’ And we would say, ‘Yes, you can.’ You would bring your ballot back in and we would literally spoil it, meaning we write “spoil” across it. We keep that ballot because we track every ballot that we receive. And then we would issue you another one, because you would only have one ballot at a time.
NO: Converse County is using ballot drop boxes this year. How are you making sure that the ballots dropped into those boxes before Election Day are secure and that they're not tampered with or even replaced?
KR: We check the ballot box twice a day. It's [under] 24-hour surveillance, for one thing. The camera’s on the inside of the building so that no one can tamper with that. It's always lit up and I have access to that footage at any given time. So that's step one.
The ballot box is checked twice a day by two people. We have a log form. We document what time the two people went out, who the two people were, how many ballots were received and how many ballots were entered into the system. That way, if there was an issue with the ballot, let's say we got four and we only entered three into WyoReg, we would make that notation and then the one that wasn't entered into the system, there would be an explanation as to why, which by the way has never happened. We have a locked box here in the courthouse in the clerk's office and they [the ballots] go into that.
Also in the clerk's office – this is important for us, this is not a requirement but this is a policy decision that I made – we have two cameras in the clerk's office that are on 24/7 from the time the ballots are received by this office until the election is over. One of them faces the counter, which is where we keep all of our ballots. They're on the inside of the counter in locked cabinets. So that way we have eyes on those ballots at all times.
NO: How frequently are you reviewing the tapes from the cameras that are set up?
KR: I check it every day. We also have cameras at the polling locations on election day for the same reason. It's not going to prevent something from happening. But if [something] does [happen], we've given law enforcement a tool to maybe help them figure out what's going on and hold someone or some people accountable for whatever wrongdoing they did or tried to do.
NO: Can I ask how long you've been the clerk in Converse County and have you identified any fraud in your time there?
KR: I was appointed in January 2020. We have had a couple instances of fraud that were not prosecuted. We've had two, I believe. They were both felons that had voted that was discovered after the fact.
NO: So when an instance of fraud is identified after the fact, was that ballot included in the certified count?
KR: It was, yep. There's no way to take that out. It is a big deal, but it's not a material error for the election. It did not affect the outcome of the election. We don't have a problem in Wyoming with voter fraud. We just don't. I think that's been proven over and over again.
NO: A couple isolated examples, but there are no widespread coordinated efforts?
KR: No ballot harvesting in Wyoming. That doesn't happen here. I'm not quite sure how it could, the way that our absentee ballots are handled.
NO: Would you be concerned, though, if someone showed up with 40 ballots to drop off at a single time?
KR: I would absolutely be concerned with that. Yes. Now, we have had people drop off two or three. And it's typically like, ‘Here's mine and my wife's and my daughter's,’ kind of a situation. But if someone came in with 40, yeah, we would probably make sure that they stayed there until I got some information from them, until every ballot could be verified.
Stay tuned to Open Spaces next week for another interview with Karen Rimmer, where we learn what happens once polling stations close.
