There was only one glitch in Tuesday’s voting that delayed checkins for voters shortly after 3 p.m. Fremont County Clerk Julie Freese noted that Fremont County was one of three county’s in a beta test during the election with Natrona and Laramie Counties and the Secretary of State’s office for the use of e-polling, rather than the use of paper poll books. Epoll checkins allowed county voters to cast ballots at any one of the 8 vote centers for their home precinct. There was a hardware malfunction that delayed checking-in voters, but Freese said she took Fremont County to work off line from the beta test and continued to sign in voters. When the system came back up in about 90 minutes, the process returned to normal. “At no time were the vote counting machines impacted as they are not connected to the Internet,” Freese said. Each vote counting machine also had a paper ballot backup for redundancy.

One of the reasons for the slow down was the large number of people who were changing their party affiliations at the polls, which dumped a huge volume of data in to the system. When the polls closed at 7 pm, there were still voters in line up in Dubois, in Lander and at Riverton.  Freese said election officials at those vote centers got everyone inside who were waiting, then closed the doors.  Total ballots cast in Fremont County in Tuesday’s voting wer 11,991, including 11,294 Republican ballots and 521 Democratic Party ballots with 126 non-partisan ballots cast. Statewide, there were 171,964  Republican ballots cast across the state to 8.194 Democratic Party ballots and 1.984 non partisan ballots.