BAIROIL—Audra Thornton knew every person who visited town hall on Tuesday to cast their vote in the election. But she still turned some folks away, instructing them to return with their IDs.
After all, rules are rules — even in Bairoil, a tiny and shrinking Sweetwater County community that only about 60 people call home.
“It doesn’t matter if we know them or not,” Thornton said. “We still have to see their identification. We just have to abide by the law.”
Following state and federal laws is of course a necessary part of administering any election in Wyoming. Poll workers and county staff, however, go to extraordinary lengths to pull off an election in the most rural reaches of the least populated state in the nation.
Bairoil’s just one example. The tallest task of every election in the former company town at the east edge of the Red Desert comes at the end of the night.
Thornton, a veteran election judge, phones in vote counts to election officials in Sweetwater County’s seat, Green River. Cindy Lane, the county clerk, classifies those as “official, unofficial” results. But the actual ballots still need to physically arrive in Green River to be fully certified. And 160 highway miles divide the two towns, which sit on opposite ends of the eighth largest county in the United States.
Bairoil’s three election judges, all women, contemplated the great journey those ballots must take. The locked bin enclosing the ballots crosses over the Continental Divide three times. That’s the hydrological feature that splits the country into two, determining whether water flows into the Atlantic or Pacific oceans.
Bairoil itself sits in the Great Divide Basin — essentially a gap in the Continental Divide, where water flows nowhere — and so the ballots first cross over while headed east of town. After a westward Interstate 80 turn at Rawlins, the ballots enter back into and then exit the Great Divide Basin, making for the triple crossing.
The ballots’ unusual every-other-year odyssey is one that many Bairoil residents hope keeps happening.
“They already closed our school,” election judge Adene Wuertley lamented. “They can leave our polling place alone.”
Bairoil, like many once-booming industry towns, is losing population and a shell of its former self. U.S. Census data shows that the population once surpassed 200 people in the 1990s. That tumbled to 68 by the 2020 Census — it’s the figure that appears on the sign coming into town. And it’s kept on slipping.
“We’re probably closer to 61 right now,” Wuertley said. “We’ve had several people move out.”
As the population has gone away, so have services and amenities. Nowadays, commercial services for the general public have essentially narrowed to a vending machine at town hall.
The track record helps explain why Bairoil residents want to keep what they have, even if it’s the ability to vote in person without having to leave town.
“This is a good thing that they’re here, it really is,” said Frankee Foley, one of the last residents to cast her ballot on Tuesday.
It’s a “heck of a lot better,” she said, than the long drive. The next closest Sweetwater County polling station is in Wamsutter, 78 miles away.
Thornton, the lead polling station judge, agreed. About 80% of Bairoil residents, she pointed out, are over the age of 65.
“It would be a hardship on a lot of people,” Thornton said. “I hope they don’t close it down.”
It’s been tried before. During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, former Secretary of State Ed Buchanan encouraged clerks around Wyoming to consolidate polling stations, partly because it was a tough year to recruit polling station workers.
Bairoil’s residents who didn’t vote by mail traveled to Wamsutter that year, the judges recalled.
Keeping the polling station local in Bairoil gives voting day an especially small-town flair. As 5 p.m. approached, the election judges had tallied up 41 ballots — a good turnout, considering there were then 50 registered voters in town. In the last couple hours of the day, almost all of the missing voters trickled in.
Wuertley at one point even rang a neighbor to check in on someone who was sick, though it turned out they were too ill to vote.
Just after 7 p.m., Thornton declared the polls closed to those present: a reporter, her two fellow judges, and a Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Deputy Sean Snider, whose job that night entailed a 160-mile ballot box delivery to Green River. After a phone call to the clerk, certifying papers and fussing with cable locks, the ballots were on the road and soon after traveling 80 mph down I-80 across southern Wyoming.
A couple hours later, the box landed in Green River with Lane and her staff at the Sweetwater County Clerk’s Office. Keeping polling places like the Bairoil vote center going, the clerk said, takes work: Staff has to transport voting equipment the day before, and results on Election Day are delayed an hour or so.
It’s not the only far-flung polling site Sweetwater County administers. The Washum and McKinnon stations, Lane said, are every bit as small — one’s even located on an ADA-compliant family farm.
“They really enjoy their polling locations in those small communities,” Lane said, “and they hold on to what they have.”
People are spread out in rural Wyoming, she said, and it’s full of small mining communities where people work “7 to 7.”
“I like that they have options,” Lane said.
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