Count them by hand
Weston County has a rare opportunity this year — and it comes at a moment when trust in our elections has been shaken to its core.
On Tuesday, the Weston County commissioners accepted the resignation of County Clerk Becky Hadlock following her arrest on felony charges tied to alleged misconduct in the 2024 election. Those charges stem from audit discrepancies, ballot counts and certification concerns that have already eroded public confidence.
The county now faces a simple but urgent question: What will it do to restore that trust?
The answer is clear. Weston County should conduct a hand-counted election.
If there was ever a place positioned to prove that a small county can run an honest, transparent and efficient election without relying on expensive private software, it is this one.
The case for it starts with what we have already experienced.
In 2024, election errors were not caught by the voting system. They were not flagged by the vendor. And when questions arose, the company at the center of Wyoming’s election infrastructure — Election Systems & Software — did not step forward to provide clarity. It did not answer questions from the press or the public. It did not help voters understand what went wrong.
Instead, it went silent.
That is unacceptable for a company entrusted with something as fundamental as counting votes.
Government contractors involved in elections should operate with a high level of transparency. They should be willing — even eager — to explain how their systems work and how ballots are handled. ES&S has shown little interest in doing that, either here or nationally.
Investigations into the industry have shown a pattern of limited oversight, aggressive protection of market share and a business model built around long-term service contracts rather than innovation. These companies are not public institutions. They are private vendors, and their incentives reflect that reality.
Weston County should not be dependent on a system like that — especially not after what happened in 2024 — and the cost only makes the question more pressing.
As the News Letter Journal has reported, Weston County pays thousands of dollars annually for election machine maintenance, licensing and support. In election years, those costs climb significantly — reaching more than $30,000 in some years. That is a substantial investment for a small county, particularly when the system being purchased failed to prevent the very problem it was meant to solve.
At the same time, Weston County already has what many larger counties lack.
It has people.
There is a high level of public interest in elections here. There are citizens willing to serve as election judges and poll watchers. There are individuals ready to be trained and to do the work necessary to ensure ballots are counted accurately.
Weston County’s size also makes it uniquely suited for a hand count. The number of ballots is manageable, and the logistics are not overwhelming. With proper planning and training, ballots can be counted in a way that is open, observable and understandable to the public.
Critics will argue that hand counting is too slow or too prone to error, but the past several election cycles have shown that machine counting is not immune to delay or mistake. Results do not arrive dramatically faster than they did before these systems were put in place, and when errors occur, they are often harder — not easier — for the public to detect and understand.
A hand-counted election allows citizens to watch the process, and it allows observers to verify the count. It replaces blind trust in software with confidence built on transparency, and that is exactly what Weston County needs right now.
With the clerk’s resignation, the county will appoint new leadership to oversee elections, and that transition presents a rare opportunity to reset expectations and rebuild confidence from the ground up.
A newly appointed clerk does not have to navigate the baggage of past decisions. Instead, they can work with the community — including experienced election judges and volunteers — to implement a system that prioritizes transparency from the start.
The commissioners should lead that effort.
They control the county’s purse strings and set the tone for how local government responds to crises of confidence like the one we now face. They have an obligation to ensure that future elections are conducted in a way that the public can trust, and they should work with the next county clerk, election staff and the public to determine what it would take to conduct a fully hand-counted election — and then commit to make it happen.
If a hand-counted election can work anywhere, it can work here. And if it works here, it can serve as a model for other rural counties across Wyoming — and the nation — that are facing the same questions about cost, transparency and trust.