Two separate committees in the Wyoming Legislature voted down matching bills on Wednesday night that would have banned all voting machines and required hand count elections in Wyoming. The House Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee voted the bill down 8-1 while the same Senate committee did not take a vote on a matching bill at all.
House Corporations Chair Rep. Chris Knapp, R-Gillette, said even had they advanced House Bill 215 on Wednesday, he did not believe that it would have gone any farther than that when considering the high quantity of bills the House is considering right now.
Rep. Paul Hoeft, R-Powell, agreed and said he has “serious questions” related to the cost of counting all ballots by hand.
“I don’t believe this bill is ready for primetime,” he said. “We need to take a deeper dive and do send it to the interim.
The topic of banning voting machines and implementing hand count elections will be referred for consideration in this summer’s interim session.
Knapp said he looks forward to working with a group of hand count supporters and the county clerks on it at that time. The clerks have grumbled at times that they’ve been pushed out from discussions on this bill, prioritized last for public comment.
“If we do work this, then it has to be with those that are responsible for our elections,” Knapp said.
Although Rep. Nina Webber, R-Cody, the only member of the House committee to vote in support of it, said she likes the bill and believes a lot of her constituents do too; she did admit many questions about how it would work t still hadn’t been answered.
Despite being given hours of time to testify before both committees, the proponents of the hand count elections had no concrete cost or time numbers behind their proposal, beyond their belief that whatever both sums would be, they would be relatively low.
Multiple members of the Senate Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee expressed concerns about the potential downsides to Senate File 184, such as opening the state up to more vulnerabilities by having ballots only counted by hand.
The county clerks opposed the bills and requested the committees to cover the proposal in an interim topic. Thermopolis resident Cheryl Aguiar, one of the main hand count proponents, warned against this on Wednesday, mentioning how it would then have to pass through the 2026 budget session. Any non-budget bill must receive a two-thirds vote just to be considered during a budget session.
Malcolm Ervin, Platte County clerk and president of the County Clerks’ Association of Wyoming, described the bill as “throwing the baby out without the bathwater.” Although the clerks provide seven pages of input on an early version of the bill, he said the bills that ended up being presented in the Legislature are not the same.
Ervin urged the House committee to instead pass House Bill 232, legislation that would initiate mandatory hand counted recounts in Wyoming. Gray doesn’t believe this bill does enough and expressed concern recounts would not be able to occur if the state runs out of money to fund them.
Feasibility
Running a hand count election in Wyoming would involve a longer counting process than what currently exists and a wide range of associated costs, dependent on how many people could be recruited to count ballots. Currently, county clerks across the state already struggle with finding people to serve as election judges.
Although he didn’t give an outright endorsement for either bill, Secretary of State Chuck Gray does believe it would be possible to run a hand count election in Wyoming.
“It is something we can do,” he said in the Senate Wednesday morning.
Gray stopped short of giving an outright endorsement to the bill, but said he does support the concept of hand count elections.
“I think we have the capability as human beings to do this,” he said. “I do think we want to relearn the process, but it’s not complex.”
Many people who have pushed for hand counting elections have said voting machines can’t be trusted because they aren’t allowed to be taken apart, and their technology is quite advanced. The movement stems off President Donald Trump’s effort to discredit the results of the 2020 elections.
Gray stood by the results of the 2024 elections in Wyoming, which he helped certified as chair of the Wyoming Canvassing Board. During that meeting, Gray had referred to it as “a great election.”
During that election, a ballot counting snafu occurred in Weston County, where incorrect totals were inserted into voting machines by the county clerk.
Gray also addressed the situation in Weston, where he said the machines worked as they were supposed to. It was a human error inputted into the machines that led to the miscount of two races with uncontested candidates.
Gray stressed that this mistake would not have been identified had the miscount occurred in a contested race with multiple candidates and was only noticed because it was clearly an anomaly.
“I don’t think it would’ve got caught,” he said.
Current Wyoming law only allows for hand tabulation in the event of a recount.
Facts And Figures
Ervin said the recount that resulted from this recount of 6% of the ballots cast in that county took six hours. A full recount, he said, would’ve taken 96 hours.
Campbell County Clerk Cindy Lovelace conducted a hand count demonstration last fall to determine the cost and time it would take. Forty people, working in 10 teams of four, participated in the trial, with an average of five hours of training per person. After 6.75 hours of counting, only four of the 10 teams had completed the testing.
Lovelace said the county would need at least 536 and as many as more than 2,000 people to count ballots in her county, with associated costs ranging from $98,000-$1.3 million to train and pay for them.
Sheridan Michelle Ritterbush discredited the way this hand count was conducted, saying the way Lovelace did it was not the way they would’ve preferred. Ritterbush’s group counted 250 ballots containing 12 races each in a little over four hours.
“What we are teaching is not what she proposed,” Ritterbush said.
In Park County, the local GOP recently made multiple mistakes in a recent hand count election that involved just a few hundred votes. Jenny DeSarro, executive director of the Equality State Policy Center, issued a scathing repudiation of the bill and mentioned that issue, expressing disbelief that hand counting could be a more secure and accurate way of conducting elections.
“SF 184 in front of you isIn fact an assault on Wyomign’s election integrity,” she said. “The hardworking people who facilitate our elections, and those who show up to vote.”
Protection?
Hand count supporters Rich Weber and Jill Kaufman argued that banning the machines will protect the county clerks and the integrity of Wyoming elections.
“We can be that leader, we can be that light for everybody, that when we remove the machines and return to hand counting and return back to the people, then we can stop this government overreach,” Kaufman said.
But Kaufman also said it was “disturbing” to see clerks and county commissioners pushing against the bills, which she saw as “lobbying against the people.” A number of polls conducted in recent years have found that Wyoming residents are already confident in the accuracy of their elections.
Weber said he sent a letter to every member of the Legislature in June to alert them with concerns his group has with the voting machines.
He believes they found countless violations but to date, there has been no evidence provided that election machines have miscounted votes in Wyoming not as a result of human error.
Rep. Tony Locke, R-Casper, claimed there are modems in the voting machines, but ES&S has consistently stated this is not the case.
Kaufman was scant on details about voting machine failures, alleging counties had failed in tests of this equipment. Although in 2024 this was true for many Wyoming counties, it was due to a minor computing error that was caused by human mistake.
There were 21 counties that had issues with their logic and accuracy tests in the lead up to the 2024 primary. Nineteen counties complied and performed successful second tests.
Weber incorrectly stated that counties failed follow-up logic and accuracy tests but two counties, Crook and Campbell, did not perform these new tests.
He also claimed the clerks wouldn’t have to worry about getting sued anymore if Wyoming bans the machines.
Sheridan resident Elena Campbell made it clear that there’s no animosity among those who want to ban the machines against the county clerks.
Former gubernatorial candidate Brent Bien was less kind, accusing the clerks of being more concerned with protecting the state than representing the people.
This comment made Sen Bill Landen, R-Casper, upset, advising Bien to be more careful with his words.
Presidential elections in France are conducted by hand, but that’s only a single race. Lovelace pointed out that in Campbell County in the last election, they had 23 races on the ballot.
As currently written, election judges who have already been working 12-14 hours, could be potentially asked to start counting ballots once the polls close at 7 p.m, setting them up for a more than 20-hour working day, if not enough judges could be found. Sen. Cheri Steinmetz, R-Lingle, said she would be personally overwhelmed if put into that position and indicated support for studying the issue in the long term.
Aguiar said this statistic is being used as a misnomer as separate judges would be staffed for the hand counting.
The Wyoming Constitution also guarantees privacy of the ballot. Fremont County Clerk Julie Freese said at small polling precincts where there are typically less than 50 voters, the clerk warned that it may be easy to identify someone with unusual handwriting, which could lead to problems down the road.
Any ballot with a single race with over and undervotes would be immediately thrown out, but not before election staff would be required to verbally inform voters to check their ballots for this. Currently, the voting machines inform voters about this risk.
Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee said removing voting machines would cause Laramie County to have to recruit as many as twice as many people to work the election as it currently does.
Joey Correnti of Rural Wyoming Matters said he finds the SF 184 to be a “great” bill, but said he doesn’t believe it’s ready to be passed into law and worries that it would create havoc in Wyoming elections if the county clerks cannot recruit enough people to count ballots.
Leo Wolfson can be reached at leo@cowboystatedaily.com.
