CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) - Wyoming Democrats plan to release the results Sunday of a presidential caucus that was postponed two weeks and scaled back to strictly mail-in voting because of the coronavirus.
The outcome is largely moot with Sen. Bernie Sanders dropping out and endorsing former Vice President Joe Biden, who is now the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Nonetheless, voting began when it was still a competitive race and state Democratic Party officials say they’ve taken pains to ensure the votes will be counted and delegates will be allocated fairly.
“It’s been a very interesting process for us to watch this COVID-19 situation unfold and have to take into account the realities of an ever-changing situation,” state Democratic Party spokeswoman Nina Hebert said Thursday.
The party for the first time will use ranked-choice voting to allocate delegates to the Democratic National Convention in August.
Beyond that, the process bears little resemblance to what the party initially had planned for April 4.
What was originally to be a combination of in-person caucusing, drop-off and mail-in vote tabulation on that date was scaled back to just drop-off and mail-in - and finally just mail-in voting - as party officials worried that a local or statewide stay-at-home order could impede the vote.
Wyoming has had no such statewide order - just a local one in Teton County - but the coronavirus has loomed large for party officials for weeks, prompting them to push back the due date for mailed ballots and tabulation day to help ensure participation.
They plan to have a courier drive the ballots to Denver for machine tabulation Saturday. After auditing overnight, results are expected by midday Sunday.
To receive a ballot, participants must have been registered as Democrats no later than March 20.
Population and party rules give Wyoming and North Dakota the smallest delegations to the national convention Aug. 17-20 in Milwaukee. Each state will have 18 delegates.
Fourteen of Wyoming’s delegates are at stake. The other four are unpledged delegates, also known as superdelegates, whose votes wouldn’t come into play except in the unexpected event of a contested convention.
The ranked-choice process allowed voters to choose and rank up to five candidates. After the initial count, candidates with the fewest votes will have theirs reallocated to the others in subsequent counts until each remaining candidate has at least 15% of the vote.
The 14 delegates will be awarded proportionately to those candidates.
Besides Biden and Sanders, Hawaii U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard; former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg; former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg; Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren; Minnesota U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar; and investor Tom Steyer, of San Francisco; were on the ballot.
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