Voter Turnout Lowest in Six Years

Carbon County saw its lowest voter turnout in six years during the primary election on August 20.

Voter turnout in Carbon County was 56.72%. Registered voters were also down from 2022, with only 5,388 registrations compared to the previous election’s 5,860.

Along party lines, voter turnout for Republicans was 60.21% while turnout for Democrats was 54.41%. Turnout for nonpartisans was 28.15%.

This is a significant decrease in voters from the previous primary election, which had 75.07% voter turnout.

Record turnouts were seen in 2022 in a heavily contested primary election for an open seat in the US Congress. The race featured candidate Harriet Hageman versus then-incumbent Liz Cheney, with Hageman winning a majority of the votes.

This contested battle was reflected in the turnout percentage in Carbon County for that year, with 100.30% participation from registered Republicans, 26.34% from registered Democrats and 14.07% from nonpartisan voters.

In the 2020 primary election, there were approximately 1,154 registered Democrats in Carbon County. That remained the same in 2022. Republicans had 3,981 registered voters in both years as well.

In the 2024 primary, registered Democrats decreased to 612 voters, while registered Republicans increased to 4,300. Nonpartisan registrations also decreased, from 750 to 476.

According to Gwynn Bartlett, Carbon County Clerk, her office processed 198 new registrations and only 70 changes at polling stations the day of the primary election. Those changes, said Bartlett, were name and address changes only.

Party changes are no longer allowed from the first day of candidate filing to primary election day due to a law passed by the Wyoming Legislature in 2023 which prevented crossover voting. Bartlett noted that the 70 changes was a drastic reduction from the 556 changes seen during the 2022 Primary Election.

While 2022 saw a large boost in voter turnout, 2024 turnout was still lower than in 2020, which had a total turnout of 59.11%. This year’s turnout in Carbon County was still larger than 2018’s, which had a turnout of 56.01%.

It should be noted that less ballots overall were cast in 2024 than in 2018. The primary in 2018 had 6,517 registered voters, with approximately 3,650 ballots cast. So while 2024 had a 0.71% increase in turnout compared to 2018, it had 594 fewer ballots, with 3,056.

Carbon County does not appear to be unique in regards to lower voter turnout.

According to the Wyoming Secretary of State’s unofficial results, in the 2024 primary, 122,693 votes were cast across the state. That is 67% of the votes cast in 2022, which had 182,232 primary votes, and 88% of the votes in 2020, which had 140,042 primary votes.

2024 had 109,113 Republican ballots across the state, followed by 11,089 Democratic ballots and 2,491 non-partisan.

In 2022, there were 172,047 state-wide Republican ballots, 8,201 Democratic and 1,984 non-partisan. 2020 had 110,575 Republican ballots, 25,526 Democratic and 3,941 non-partisan.

2022 had the lowest amount of Democratic ballots cast, with less than half the voters seen in previous years. The number of Democratic ballots in 2024 was larger than in 2022, but was still greatly lower than the number cast in 2020, 2018 and 2016.

In fact, the number of Democratic ballots in 2024 only surpassed the number cast in 2022. In every other year’s results from the Wyoming Secretary of State’s website, going back to 1996, the number of Democratic primary voters exceeded the amount in 2024.

This is not true for the number of Republican ballots, as the amount cast in the 2024 primary was higher than the total Republican votes in every primary from 1996 to 2016.

*Editor's Note: The print version of this story incorrectly reported that Liz Cheney and Harriet Hageman were running for the US Senate, not the US Congress. This has been corrected on the online edition. The Saratoga Sun apologizes for the error.*