A problem with the routers - the electronic traffic cops of the Internet - recently slowed absentee voting in Natrona and Teton counties, Wyoming's chief elections officer said Thursday.

That problem will be fixed early next week, eight days before the Nov. 4 general election, according to Peggy Nighswonger.

Election officials in Laramie, Natrona and Teton counties began noticing that the new statewide voter registration software wasn't working as early as the August primary, Teton County elections supervisor Sharon Nethercott said.

Tuesday, absentee voters in Natrona County had to wait while elections clerks entered their information on a computer, Natrona County Clerk Renea Vitto said.

These lines had nothing on the three-hour delays endured by early voters in Florida this week, but they were annoying nonetheless.

Teton County absentee voters were understanding and a couple of Natrona County absentee voters decided to take ballots and mail them back to the county clerk, Nethercott and Vitto said.

When reports of the delays reached Nighswonger, she asked voter registration software company Saber Corp. to do some tests, she said.

The Secretary of State bought the Centralized Voter Registration system from Saber Corp. to comply with the Help America Vote Act, Nighswonger said. Wyoming is one of 13 states with Saber Corp.'s voter registration software, according to its Web site www.sabercorp.com.

The tests traced the problem to the Riverton-based wyoming.com, the Internet service provider connecting some of the state's counties with Cheyenne, Nighswonger said.

Specifically, the slowdowns happened with the routers, wyoming.com president Steve Mossbrook said.

The software was fine, and Wyoming now has a centralized system to track elections instead of the previous county autonomy, Mossbrook said. "Basically, (Wyoming) decided to join the 21st century," he said.

But advanced and sensitive software also needs ever-more advanced and faster hardware to process it, Mossbrook said. "It's time critical."

The Centralized Voter Registration system is interactive, and needs to respond quickly to sent data so it can move to the next step, he said. "If there's a gap in the responsiveness, it shuts down."

The routers affecting Laramie, Natrona and Teton counties couldn't handle the speed, he said.

Mossbrook likened routers to traffic cops that stand in the middle of the road and send packets of data to their destinations millions of times a second, he said.

"Routers are the brains of the Internet," Mossbrook said. "As the Internet gets bigger, I need bigger cops to handle data [transfers]."

So between midnight and 6 a.m. Monday, wyoming.com will shut down briefly so the company can replace the routers affecting Natrona and Teton counties, he said. "It's just a changeout so everything will be done very quickly."

Reach Tom Morton at (307) 266-0592, or at Tom.Morton@trib.com.