Though her actions and those of her office skewed three unopposed races in the 2024 general election, the clerk of Weston County didn’t act with misconduct, malfeasance or willful negligence, Gov Mark Gordon concludes in a Friday decision letter.
The governor rejected the call of Secretary of State Chuck Gray to initiate court processes to remove Weston County Clerk Becky Hadlock from office, after Hadlock’s office skewed the results of multiple races, including presenting an inordinate number of undervotes in the race of Wyoming House Speaker Chip Neiman, R-Hulett, during the 2024 general election.
Gordon referred to earlier precedent saying he should only have his attorney general prosecute in court for the removal of a public official if he finds “misconduct” or “malfeasance” in the official’s actions.
“Although I recognize that Clerk Hadlock made many serious mistakes in the 2024 Weston County elections,” wrote Gordon in a Friday decision letter, “her actions do not rise to the level of misconduct or malfeasance, as I understand the meaning of those terms in this situation. I do not believe there is a clear path to proving guilt.”
It doesn’t seem Hadlock was trying to skew an election, though she showed incompetence and a concerning level of indifference, the governor added.
Another reason the governor has chosen not to intervene is out of respect for Weston County and its local electorate, he wrote.
Hadlock did not immediately respond to a Friday request for comment left with her office attendant.
As for Gray, he said Gordon’s decision left him “deeply troubled,” as he said it ignored the important allegation that Hadlock filed a false post-election audit certification with his office — a factor that, the secretary added, conveys that Hadlock attempted a coverup.
The Complaint
The complaint submitted against Hadlock outlined allegations of misconduct from the 2020, 2022 and 2024 election cycles.
Gordon said the state’s precedent calls for focusing on the allegations from the timeframe of the official’s current term of office, not her prior terms, though courts may draw from the “intent, motive or general manner” of prior bad-act allegations.
So he focused his investigation on the 2024 election and the complaints surrounding it.
The Ballots
Multiple ballot versions were distributed to polling stations during the general election, but some of the ballots were incorrect. One ballot failed to rotate candidate names properly as state law requires; and the other omitted a line of information, leading to a misalignment.
Hadlock told Gordon the various ballot versions, some wrong and some not, were the result of mistakes that happened during the ballot formatting and editing process.
County clerks are required to check, edit and confirm final ballots before distributing them, noted Gordon.
Weston County contracts with Election Systems & Software (ES&S) for printing and formatting ballots, and voting machine programming.
Ahead of election, Weston County receives a draft ballot proof from the company by email, which is reviewed for errors. The company also uses that proof in programming the machines and coding how they’ll read the ballot bubbles.
So proofing is of the “utmost importance for accurate tabulation,” says the governor’s letter.
If the clerk doesn’t find any errors, she orders the total number of printed ballots, and those arrive in sealed bundles.
Batches
After that first ballot proofing, ES&S noticed that the spacing for one of the races was wrong. The bubble for the candidate was one space too high on the ballot making it misaligned with the machines’ programming.
Hadlock acknowledged the error via email, then ordered corrected ballots.
More sealed batches arrived and were stored in a secure location.
“While it remains unclear how different ballot versions, some correct and some incorrect, arrived at different polling places, it is clear that different batches were sent out,” wrote Gordon. “It may be that some ballots from the first mailed batches that were known to be incorrect were inadvertently mixed with ballots from the second batch in the vault, resulting in incorrect ballot versions being sent out to polling places along with correct allot versions.”
That sounded like a procedural error to Gordon, he wrote.
What neither Hadlock nor ES&S noticed is that the corrected ballots contained yet another error — it didn’t rotate the names of two Republican candidates for Weston County Commission who were running unopposed for two at-large seats.
The governor reiterated that state law requires different ballots to have candidates’ names in different orders.
The machines were expecting those names to be in different orders and it took the votes incorrectly, the letter indicates.
Test Run
Hadlock had tested the voting machines ahead of the election. But she wasn’t able to find the test deck of sample ballots she needed for that task, so she manually filled out her own test deck to match the ES&S matrix, running them through until an errorless count was achieved, Gordon wrote.
He noted that it is possible the machine test wouldn’t have detected the errors on the ballots since it wasn’t being tested against the ballots that had errors.
There’s another allegation that an ES&S employee acted as courier for ballots, “allegedly breaking a chain of custody.”
Gordon chalked this up to a lesser issue: ES&S employees are often on site to help with election night and their machines if necessary. They work for their own company and contract with the county clerk and “are not anxious to sully the reputation of the company for which they work or the county clerk that hired them.”
ES&S employees have shuttled ballots to places before, and the practice doesn’t appear to be unlawful, Gordon wrote.
Poll Workers
Some people in their interviews said Hadlock didn’t properly train election judges and poll workers.
Others said she was rude and condescending.
To the first point, Gordon noted county clerks don’t have a uniform standard of training to which they’re called to adhere. To the second, he wrote that “while I do not condone arrogant behavior, I do not consider it an act of misconduct or malfeasance.”
So he didn’t consider those comments in reaching his final decision, the governor added.
Ain’t Easy Though
His decision was not an easy one, since Hadlock and her staff made “multiple mistakes,” wrote Gordon.
He was also discouraged by her interview during his investigation, as she wasn’t as forthcoming as he’d hoped.
“She did not deny the matters” when confronted, the governor notes. “It was disappointing that she did not appear to understand the significance of her mistakes but, again, her interview did not reveal any intent or willfulness on her part.”
He reiterated that the mistakes appeared sloppy and not malicious. She didn’t show the “habitual inattention to the public business” for which state precedent calls in removal cases.
The canvassing board detected the mistakes and remedied them. The races’ outcomes were not impacted other than with some odd numbers such as a high number of undervotes, since the candidates in question ran unopposed.
And, Gordon wrote again, “Hadlock is an elected official in her own right.”
She answers to the people of Weston County.
“We must account for the fact that people will make mistakes,” Gordon wrote, adding that she also doesn’t seem to have committed gross or willful negligence as Gray had claimed.
Gray ‘Deeply Troubled’
Gray in a Friday statement said he was deeply troubled at Gordon’s decision letter, and the secretary accused the governor of “refusing to conduct a rigorous analysis of the facts of this case."
In particular, wrote Gray in bold font, he’s troubled that Gray didn’t note something Gray repeatedly has: Hadlock told the secretary, according to his account, that the undervotes were to be expected and they weren’t an error, and that her office had conducted a successful post-election audit.
Gordon not outlining this amounts to “lies by omission in completely ignoring our finding that Clerk Hadlock submitted a false post-election audit report with our office, which we discussed multiple times as the most serious finding in our investigation released in March," Gray wrote.
The false post-election audit appears to “be a willful violation of (election) code,” wrote Gray.
A later, properly performed audit showed 21 of 75 ballots in the audit batch had discrepancies, and thereby debunked the initial post-election audit results Hadlock sent to Gray, the secretary said.
“This false post-election audit occurred after we had expressed concerns about the anomalies,” Gray wrote. “Our investigation came to the conclusion there are only two reasonable explanations for the false submission of this audit, absent another explanation provided by the Weston County Clerk, the Governor, or any relevant actors, which was not even discussed.”
There are two reasons for this, Gray has theorized: One is that Hadlock made a false assertion, and the other is that she didn’t conduct an audit and said she did.
“Either one of those possibilities would suggest that she attempted to hide the problems with the conduct of the 2024 General Election,” he wrote. “The Governor’s omission of discussing the false post-election audit in his decision is inherently problematic. Gordon has gotten used to the media refusing to cover these lies of omission, and this is another example of those lies of omission.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
