Bells! Whistles! Cheers! All hail first-time voters!

CASPER, Wyo. — As India “Rowan” Olson slipped her ballot into the voting machine on Tuesday, a poll worker at her precinct yelled, “first-time voter!”

Cheers erupted. Bells rang. New Year’s Eve–style party noisemakers spun around. Whistles blew.

Olson felt awkward.

“It was kind of embarrassing, but it was kind of cool,” Olson said before leaving the Industrial Building at the Natrona County Fairgrounds. The building is home to 13 precincts after former Natrona County Clerk Renea Vitto spearheaded the effort to consolidate polling places in 2016 when voting at schools became untenable.

Olson, 20, had never exercised her right to vote, she said, offering some excuses: “I didn’t have time and I always forgot.”

This year was different, she said. “It’s the presidential election and I probably should vote.”

Initially it was nerve-wracking, Olson said, when she and her parents got in the line of voters at 7:45 a.m. as the queue still stretched from the doors of the Industrial Building south almost to the Arena and the windchill hovered around 20.

She thought the process would be difficult, but it turned out otherwise.

The election workers asked her for her name, age and driver’s license, Olson said, adding that “It was very easy actually.”

The noisy rejoicing accompanied every first-time voter, and the sound could be heard way outside the Industrial Building.

The first-time-voter hoopla started in 2022, said Eileen Hill, director of the Natrona County Information Technology Department and election official at the Industrial Building.

“It was kind of a grassroots thing,” Hill said. “We didn’t come up with it; it just sort of took hold.”