The House Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee is considering a bill that would make Wyoming the first state in the nation to ban election voting machines.
The committee heard a vocal appeal Friday from those in support of House Bill 215, which if it becomes law would make all elections in the state have ballots counted by hand. The committee did not vote on the 43-page bill and will continue hearing testimony Monday.
Hand Count Movement
The bill is sponsored by state Rep. Scott Smith, R-Lingle, but Smith quickly made it clear to the committee that Wyoming Voter Initiatives is the major operator behind it, deferring to members of the group that drafted the bill, who spent most of the time presenting it and explaining what it does.
As a result, Rep. Chris Knapp, R-Gillette, even referred to this group as “the co-presenter of the bill.”
Wyoming Voter Initiatives is a group of residents that recently got a property tax initiative on the 2026 Wyoming ballot. Last summer, it started a new effort to have all ballots counted by hand. The goal is to get this initiative on the 2026 ballot and implemented for the 2028 election cycle.
HB 215 is written nearly identical to the ballot initiative.
More than 50 people showed up to watch and or speak at Friday’s meeting.
‘Mother Of All Bills’
One of the lead organizers of the group, Cheryl Aguiar, described the bill as the most important of the 2025 session and “the mother of all bills.”
“If this bill passes, Wyoming leads the way in not being a slave anymore to these machines,” she said.
Smith described Friday’s meeting as a “family reunion” of like-minded people who don’t trust the state’s voting machines. In 2024, the Wyoming Republican Party passed a resolution urging lawmakers to move to hand-count elections.
“I think this is a good way to get back to bringing confidence to the electorate,” he said.
Gail Symons, a Sheridan resident who runs the lobbying group Civics307, challenged that narrative, pointing to a recent University of Wyoming survey that found 94% respondents trust the state’s elections.
Misinformation about elections, she said, is much more detrimental than any voting machine. She also said machine counting is more accurate and secure than hand counting, and that not a single scientific study has found otherwise.
People Speak First
The committee also broke from traditional protocol by taking public comment first instead of hearing any testimony from state officials like county clerks or Secretary of State Chuck Gray, which will come Monday. Most of the people who testified spoke in favor of the bill.
Gray has said he supports hand count elections, likely the only secretary of state in the country to have publicly issued this stance.
In 1957, the Wyoming Legislature first permitted the use of automated voting machines in the Cowboy State, according to the State Archives. Punch card voting developed in the 1960s, allowing voters to punch holes in cards to select candidates with a “ballot marking device.”
Prior to that, elections in Wyoming and most places around the world counted ballots by hand.
Electronic voting machines have been used in Wyoming since 2004.
Hand counting elections has gained steam since the 2020 election after allegations of fraud were brought by some Republicans against voting machines.
Symons said that, like not having to use a rotary telephone anymore, she’s glad elections today use modern technology.
She also said there’s an expectation for quick results in an election that didn’t exist in the past. During the 2024 elections, all of the election results were reported by midnight on Election Day.
‘Mountain Of Evidence’?
Although some described there being a “mountain of evidence” showing machines to be unreliable, there have been no documented instances of these machines performing major election errors in Wyoming that weren’t initially caused by a human operator.
Former state legislator Allan Slagle brought up a situation that occurred in Weston County last fall, where an error by the county clerk caused a miscount in two of the precincts in two races. The miscount had no impact on the final result of the candidates, who were running unopposed in those races.
Random audits are performed for Wyoming elections and recounts for close races, but Wheatland resident Lucinda Houtchens said this isn’t enough to guarantee machines get the votes right.
Aguiar dismissed concerns about the time it would take to count ballots by hand, saying the machine tests also take a significant amount of time and in her recent inspection “never got it right.”
Malcolm Ervin, Platte County clerk and president of the County Clerks’ Association of Wyoming, said his organization opposes HB 215 because it believes it would cost too much money. County clerks view the voting machines as safe, and if changes are made to the system, they don’t want the wholesale changes the bill would bring.
“It’s a good system, it does work,” he said.
Ervin also told Cowboy State Daily after the meeting only one petition in one county was filed to challenge the tests of this election equipment.
“There’s no opportunity to respond to why they think we’ve failed on the testing,” Ervin said. “That’s what’s interesting to me, they’re not using a statutory vehicle right now to challenge things they have concerns about.
“They’re just casting public doubt as opposed to proceeding through a due process system.”
But Rich Weber, a member of Voter Initiatives, said the proprietary information in voting machines prevents inspection of the way they count ballots to see if it’s correct.
The bill requires the county clerks to perform a public demonstration of the hand counting.
Ervin said he is encouraged by the passion expressed by people on this issue and their desire to get involved in civic engagement.
“There’s not one bit of animus to anyone who testified here, we just don’t think we should just throw out the equipment,” he said. “If we’re going to throw them out, we want to throw them out for reality.”
Costs And Figures
Multiple people pushing for the hand counts said they should consider the benefit getting rid of the machines would be for the clerks, even though the clerks themselves spoke against the bill. Ervin said he doesn’t believe there’s any way a hand count election would be easier to run or cheaper than current elections.
The bill contains no fiscal estimate.
During a demonstration performed in Campbell County last fall, the clerk there determined it would cost that county as much as $1.3 million and at least $98,874. This roughly aligns with the $103,000 cost estimate determined by South Dakota hand counting activist Rick Weible.
Houtchens estimated a much lower cost as well, saying it would only cost around $5,300 per county to count 5,000 ballots in a little more than three hours, along with 32 preparation hours for the count. She compared this to the weeks it takes to prepare electronic voting machines for an election.
“Don’t let anyone fool you into believing the machines save time,” she said.
Aguiar also countered it would cost more than $1 million to replace the state’s 350 ES&S voting machines with machines that could handle a new Windows software update.
Currently, election results are usually returned within three hours of the election polls closing. The number of people who sign up to hand count ballots will significantly impact the time that the final tally is determined.
If HB 215 were to pass into law, the state’s requirements for reporting election results would almost certainly have to be adjusted, as current law says election results must be returned by 10:30 p.m. election night.
Eight of Wyoming’s 23 counties had fewer than 5,000 ballots cast in the 2024 general election.
Campbell County resident Janet Mader expressed concern about there being inconsistencies in the bill and pointed out that much larger counties have many more ballots, like hers, where more than 18,000 ballots were counted. In addition, two recounts in Campbell County happened because of close races there.
During a hand count demonstration performed in Wheatland, Jill Kauffman said the hand counts took roughly 1-6 minutes per ballot.
The bill also includes the performing of “double audits” involving 250 ballots each.
“When you get to the end, it’s 100% correct,” Kauffman claimed.
Kauffman was speaking on behalf of Cause of America, an “election integrity” group founded by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell. Lindell is an election-conspiracy theorist who’s amplified President Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and told Cowboy State Daily in 2022 that even Wyoming’s elections are “rigged.”
She said she trusts her county clerk and residents of Wyoming to count ballots more so than machines.
“Even though a hand counter can make a mistake, and maybe one vote has a mistake, programming on a machine can be hundreds, thousands, and hundreds of thousands of errors or votes lost,” she said.
Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.
