Weston County election snafu renews calls for hand counting Wyoming election results
FROM WYOFILE:
The state currently relies on electronic election equipment to tabulate votes. Some lawmakers want to outlaw that.
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.
WyoFile is an independent nonprofit news organization focused on Wyoming people, places and policy.
This story was posted on Oct. 2, 2025.