CASPER—A miscount in Weston County’s 2024 general election and the ensuing fallout over the last year have refueled calls for banning electronic election equipment in Wyoming.
The state already relies on paper ballots in all but one county, but such a move would make Wyoming the only state in the country to count all its ballots by hand.
“I’m so thankful that I work with legislators that are serious about making sure that we get good answers for what happened, and we don’t blow this off,” Speaker of the House Chip Neiman, R-Hulett, told the Wyoming Legislature’s Weston County Clerk 2024 General Election Subcommittee as it met Monday in Casper.
The subcommittee was formed this summer to investigate Weston County Clerk Becky Hadlock.
In November, as Neiman was running unopposed for reelection to the House District 1, he and other voters noticed some funky-looking numbers on the night of the general election. Initially, the results showed Neiman received 166 votes, while 1,289 voters left that part of their ballot blank, also known as an undervote.
It was soon discovered that Hadlock had used a combination of the correct ballots and misprinted ones and a hand count ultimately worked to sort out the results. The mishap, however, concerned many Weston County voters who say their trust in elections has been broken.
It’s now up to lawmakers to mend that, Neiman told the committee.
“Paper ballots and a hand count would have stopped all this and would have never even got out of the gate,” Neiman said, prompting several meeting attendees to cheer and applaud.
“We will do everything that we possibly can to make sure that the people of the state of Wyoming have confidence in their elections and they feel good about what’s going on and they know that their votes have been cast and they’ve been counted correctly,” Neiman told the committee.
Neiman’s promise comes with considerable weight. As speaker of the House, he has unilateral power to prioritize bills, or hold them back in his drawer to kill them. Neiman is also a member of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus, which holds the majority in the House.
Altogether, a bill to hand count ballots could likely go further in the upcoming legislative session than in years past when Republicans — including several Freedom Caucus members and endorsees — got cold feet and killed mirror bills to ban electronic election equipment.
Meanwhile, lawmakers are pursuing criminal charges against Hadlock after she failed to appear at the Monday meeting despite being subpoenaed.
Background
Calls to prohibit electronic ballot tabulators aren’t new to Wyoming.
In 2022, for example, Republicans in Park County led a pursuit of hand counting ballots, but their efforts came up short. And GOP organizers sought signatures in 2024 for a ballot initiative to require county clerks to use a hand-tabulation system.
More recently, Rep. Scott Smith, R-Lingle, and former Sen. Darin Smith, R-Cheyenne, brought mirror bills in the 2025 general session to not just eliminate tabulators but also ban electronic pollbooks as well.
Earlier this year, Secretary of State Chuck Gray encouraged lawmakers to keep the door open on some of the more sweeping election measures from 2025, including a ban on all electronic election equipment, including voting machines, tabulators and pollbooks.
“It’s something that we really need to be examining,” Gray said when pressed by House Minority Leader Rep. Mike Yin, D-Jackson, to clarify his stance on banning such equipment.
Gray did not respond by publishing time to WyoFile’s request Wednesday to confirm his support for prohibiting electronic voting equipment, or whether it will be his top priority of the 2026 budget session.
Following publication, Gray asked WyoFile on Thursday to add the following statement: “I have always advocated for hand counts and hand audits of ballots to make our elections more secure and transparent. We are focused on ensuring the fulfillment of President Trump’s vision for election integrity here in Wyoming, and this includes alignment with President Trump on his vision for election integrity.”
In August, Gray, alongside the Freedom Caucus, backed the Trump administration’s plans to stop states from using mail-in ballots and voting machines. Such an executive order has not been issued yet, but is expected to be soon.
At the meeting in Casper, Sen. Bob Ide, R-Casper, asked Neiman and Gray if they had “any comments to help us along here as far as whether we could try to move legislation to eliminate the voting machines and go to paper ballots and hand [counts?]”
Gray pointed to legislation from earlier this year, including the two Smith bills, and said he supported that legislation and “certainly can continue to be involved in that conversation and supportive of that conversation.”
Post-election audit
The subcommittee Monday focused less on the initial miscount in Weston County, and more on a post-election audit Hadlock submitted to Gray’s office that included false information.
County clerks are required by law to perform a post-election audit using a statistical analysis developed by the University of Wyoming during Ed Buchanan’s tenure as secretary of state. The audit was designed to measure election accuracy, and the Wyoming State Canvassing Board uses its results in deciding whether to certify results.
However, Hadlock submitted an initial post-election audit showing no errors despite the discrepancy in the results in Neiman’s race as well as a county commissioner contest.
Gray spent much of his public testimony criticizing Gov. Mark Gordon, accusing him of ignoring the post-election audit in his decision against seeking Hadlock’s removal from office. Betsy Anderson, general counsel for the governor, told the committee the governor’s office had “reviewed and considered” Gray’s own investigation, which highlighted the post-election audit.
In his review, Gordon concluded that while Hadlock “made many serious mistakes” in the 2024 election, her actions did not “rise to the level of misconduct or malfeasance” required to recommend that the attorney general seek the clerk’s removal in district court.
“I take election integrity seriously. A single note of distrust in our system can reverberate to many times its size, even in uncontested elections like this one where the outcome was never affected,” Gordon told WyoFile in a statement after the meeting. “The sanctity of our elections is of the utmost importance. Decisions of the voters should not be casually cast aside in favor of a process in which only a few can participate in nominating a replacement officer without compelling evidence of misconduct or malfeasance.”
Other clerks
“The further into this we get, I recognize that Clerk Hadlock has the answers to the pieces in this that are missing,” Casper Republican Rep. Jayme Lien said at the meeting.
While Hadlock did not show up Monday, other county clerks did, including Platte County Clerk Malcolm Ervin, who is also president of the County Clerks’ Association.
“I hope I can provide information to your committee that is helpful to understand that the matter at hand was an isolated incident,” Ervin said.
In Platte County, Ervin said, there were a number of voters who expressed concerns in light of events in Weston County.
“Ultimately, the acts of one county clerk have called into question the honesty and accountability of other clerks,” Ervin said. “I hope our presence today shows we understand this is a very serious matter. We owe it to the public to give answers and be accountable for our actions.”
While Ervin said the Weston County incident was isolated, going forward, county clerks intend to do six things as a group to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
That includes suggesting the Legislature form an audit working group, seeking and developing more election training for county clerks and their election staff, as well as continuing to work on testing standards for equipment.
Fremont County Clerk Julie Freese also attended the meeting. Powell Republican Sen. Dan Laursen asked her if the clerks’ association had discussed the topic of hand counting.
“Yes, we have,” Freese said, adding that the clerks did a training in the last week on hand counting ballots to prepare for any forthcoming legislation.
“We are here to help. This is what we want to make sure all citizens have the right to vote and that their vote counts,” Freese said. “We weren’t subpoenaed to be here. We chose to come here today. And it’s been tough. It’s been tough. I’m not going to lie.”
Several speakers had been critical of county clerks in their testimony throughout the meeting, including a Sheridan resident who used a pejorative term to describe one of the clerks.
The subcommittee will hold a virtual meeting Monday.
I think that there can be some validity for hand counting especially in cases of tight results, run-offs, and even to test accuracy. However an all or none approach is not a good way to do things at all.
For a test, I would love to see 1000 ballots counted by machine and by hand. These ballots would need to include the presidential candidates; the state executive candidates; state representatives and senators; city/county offices; judge retention; etc. Basically a four year ballot for the average population county in Wyoming. I figure a county that has somewhere around 15,000 to 20,000 in population. The largest precinct would be counted.
I’m not sure if this has already been done. If not, it needs to be done to prove to us “commoners” that hand counting can be done effectively, accurately, timely, and is cost effective.
Criminy sakes, let’s not utilize the technology that comes with the 21st century. Let’s instead go back to paper ballots and hand counts. And then what do we do when that method is proven to have issues? This smacks as a witch hunt to me. Should Ms Hadlock appeared on her behalf, yes of course. Is this line of prosecution a prime example of over exuberance on the part of our esteemed politicians, of course. She stated she had a scheduling conflict, accept it, let the voters of Weston County decide her competence.
Are you aware the Committee requested her appearance two previous times and were denied? As such, the Committee was compelled to issue a lawful subpoena by a sheriff. Citizens cannot defy a lawful subpoena simply because they have a conflict of schedule. Good citizens would rearrange their schedule in order to appear. The statute for failure to appear of up to a $100 fine and up to six months in jail. The County Clerk should receive the fine as well as time in jail for her defiance.
As a retired official court reporter, I am appalled Ms. Hadlock defied a lawful subpoena. The clerk had been requested by the committee to appear before them two times prior to the committee being compelled to issue a subpoena. I believe a $100 fine is insignificant compared to her salary of approximately $125,000 and believe as a result of her incompetence and defiance of the subpoena warrants a fine and jail time. I believe Ms. Hadlock feels emboldened by the lack of investigation from Govenor Gordon. I do not accept Govenor Gordon’s derelection of duty in his intentional misuse of the SOS’s report outlining Ms. Hadlock’s incompetence and claiming the report wasn’t critical because the SOS is not an elector from Weston County. Every citizen who cares about election integrity should listen to Chuck Gray’s testimony from Monday’s meeting or read Chuck Gray’s report in order to find out exactly how incompetent Ms. Hadlock is in her position as Weston County Clerk. Only if the citizens of Wyoming take the time to investigate through all avenues will they ever get a thorough, truthful picture of what took place in both the primary and general election of ’24 because there is never enough information printed or released in local media forms.
While I do believe that Ms. Hadlock did not intentionally intend do anything wrong, I also would have to say she has not yet summoned the will to do a single thing right either…
Hand counting by humans is far less accurate than machine counting. Human error and the potential for malfeasance are problems that are not solved by throwing out the machines. The County Clerks’ Association has some good ideas to improve the system. We retain paper ballots as a way to check the results, but there seems to be a lot of opposition to re-counting or examining the paper ballots. Election officials are human, and when they have done the hard work of certifying election results, it is understandable that they feel offended and frustrated when people question the results. IMHO, increasing audits, perhaps 100% hand re-counts of random precincts each election cycle, and an effort to be more responsive to voter concerns is a better solution than reverting to old school hand counts, which are far less than perfect. The machines in Weston County counted the votes correctly. It was human error that caused the problem. Does ES&S not code ballots to indicate the version when they are asked to re-print errant ballots? Shouldn’t the machines be programmed to reject incorrect ballot versions? No one at the hearing asked these questions.
The freedom carcass seems bound and determined to drag Wyoming back to the 1800s. Let us hand count the ballots. It takes 50x longer, is MUCH more expensive and way less accurate.
Grow up. What next? Ban voting? It’s just to hard, time consuming, and above all expensive? This is just like property taxes, they’ll just eliminate them! How will the legislature fill that giant hole in the budget? Well…….what hole? There’s no hole, just budget better! People make mistakes, the solution isn’t to suddenly ‘outlaw’ the activity. Children, our legislature is run by children. They need crayons and coloring books because clearly they have zero to do.
Who’s going to count what the hand counters counted? Serenity now. vote the freedumb caucus out.
I question anything the freedom caucus is involved in
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