CHEYENNE — They called it a “belt-and-suspenders” approach to election fraud.
That’s what the Wyoming Senate Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee decided Monday when it advanced House Bill 84, a measure born from the troubled 2024 general election in Weston County that would specifically make it a felony to submit a false post-election ballot audit to the secretary of state.
“I don’t think underlining this particular grievance is a bad idea necessarily,” said Sen. Bill Landen, R-Casper, who made the motion to advance the bill. “It’s kind of a ‘we really mean it’ bill.”
The vote was 4-1, with Committee Chairman Cale Case, R-Lander, casting the lone no.
Everyone who testified Monday agreed on at least one thing: submitting a false post-election audit is already a felony under existing Wyoming law.
During the hearing, Secretary of State Chuck Gray told the committee he supports the bill but wanted to be transparent about the legal landscape.
“I believe there’s widespread agreement on this, that submitting a false or fraudulent document is already a felony under the election code,” Gray said, pointing to multiple existing statutes — including the blanket violation provision in Title 22 and a separate felony under Title 6 for filing false documents with the secretary of state’s office.
Asked by Landen whether the bill would strip prosecutorial discretion in cases of simple human error, Gray noted the bill includes an intent requirement.
“It would have to be with the intent to deceive or mislead,” Gray said, pointing to the language already embedded in the statute the bill amends.
Still, Gray argued the measure was worth passing.
“I still think just to make it even clearer — why would we not do this?” he said, before adding a careful caveat about the active legal proceedings surrounding the Weston County situation. “We got an active case where there’s removal for a clerk… That’s gotten interesting up there.”
On Feb. 20, Attorney General Keith Kautz filed a petition in Weston County District Court seeking to remove Hadlock from office. The petition alleges she submitted the clean audit after being told about ballot errors and did not withdraw or correct it in a timely manner. That civil case moves on a fast timeline — Hadlock has 20 days after being served to respond, with trial to follow within five to 30 days.
Separately, a criminal case over Hadlock’s failure to appear for a legislative subpoena last September has been paused. A Casper circuit court judge granted a stay in January while defense attorney Ryan Semerad appeals to a higher court, arguing lawmakers exceeded their authority.
Umbrella Concern
Throughout Monday’s hearing, Committee Chairman Cale Case, R-Lander, raised pointed questions about the wisdom of adding increasingly specific items to a list of election violations — warning it could backfire in court.
“Sometimes when we’re overly specific about violations, then I’m worried that prosecutors and the courts will look at the specificness of that violation,” Case said. “We lose the impact of the general umbrella.”
County clerks and election officials sign hundreds of documents in the course of their work, he noted, and the Legislature doesn’t enumerate each one individually.
“And I’m a little bit worried about that,” he said.
Those concerns found an echo from Marguerite Herman, a lobbyist for the League of Women Voters of Wyoming.
“I would agree with you that adding that list kind of gives the implication that it’s exhaustive, that everything that should catch the attention of the prosecutors is on that list, and it’s not,” Herman told the committee. “And I think it’s unnecessary.”
The Weston County situation, she observed, “has been very generous in lending itself to legislation this session. Not all of it is absolutely important.”
Her organization did not formally oppose the bill.
Crook County
Calling in remotely in support was Mark Koep, chairman of the Republican Party in Crook County, who noted that some of his county’s representatives serve in districts overlapping with Weston County.
“I’ve been closely connected to the Weston County issue, and I’m troubled by the overall process,” Koep told the committee. “I believe this bill adds good language overall to help support election integrity.”
He acknowledged Case’s concerns about specificity, saying he worried about adding criminality to the signing of documents in an already complex election system — but ultimately sided with the bill.
“It did come out of committee,” Koep said. “The overall intent is good.”
Ongoing Removal
The bill’s journey through the Legislature has played out against a backdrop of escalating legal action against Weston County Clerk Becky Hadlock, whose handling of the 2024 general election set the entire chain of events in motion.
In November 2024, faulty ballots were mixed with proper ballots in Weston County, skewing results in two uncontested races. After the election, the clerk submitted a post-election audit to the secretary of state’s office showing no errors affecting any of the 75 sample ballots — despite having been informed that ballot errors had likely caused anomalous results.
A corrected audit submitted days later showed 21 errors among the 75 ballots.
At the Feb. 11 House Corporations Committee hearing where HB 84 passed unanimously 9-0, no county clerks spoke against it. But at that same hearing, the broader tensions between election reform legislation and the people who actually run Wyoming’s elections were on full display during testimony on a related bill.
The president of the County Clerks Association, Platte County Clerk Malcolm Ervin, told the committee that clerks across the state had grown frustrated with the volume of election bills flowing from the Weston County controversy.
“The county clerks of the state of Wyoming have serious implementation concerns,” Ervin said during testimony on the hand-recount bill, House Bill 52. “We thought about not even coming, but we owe a duty to the public to let them know that should this pass in its current form and have issues that we suspect it will, the public deserves to know that it was not our fault it was passed the way it was written.”
Senate Resistance
The passage of HB 84 on Monday stands in contrast to the fate of other Weston County-inspired election bills that have died in the Senate chamber.
On Thursday, House Bill 85 — which would have required enhanced record-keeping and formal objection procedures during post-election audits — failed 21-9 on the Senate floor. Two days before that, House Bill 86, which would have allowed the secretary of state to file formal complaints seeking the removal of county clerks, died 2-3 in the Senate Corporations Committee.
During floor debate on HB 85, Sen. Tara Nethercott, R-Cheyenne, delivered a pointed rebuke of the broader election reform push.
“Enough is enough,” Nethercott told her colleagues. “Pandering to this belief that our elections are not secure — and they are secure, thanks to our county clerks. They do not support this bill. Vote no on this bill.”
She urged the Senate to resist what she characterized as national political pressure bleeding into Wyoming’s election policy.
“Show the level of courage and discretion to rise above that populism, to rise above that public perception, and just do what’s right,” Nethercott said.
Gray’s Frustration
By Saturday, the secretary of state was venting his frustration to an allied audience.
Speaking to the Wyoming Republican Party’s Central Committee at the Little America Hotel in Cheyenne, Gray placed the blame squarely on Senate resistance.
“The reality, though, is that the Wyoming State Senate is not really cooperating with these bills,” Gray told the assembled party leaders. He recounted the defeat of HB 85 and cast it in starkly partisan terms.
“And the insiders, allied with the Democrats, to defeat that bill, 9 to 21,” Gray said. “That’s how bad it’s gotten over there in the state Senate. We can’t take our eyes off the ball.”
The Roll Call Vote
Ayes: Landen, Boner, Steinmetz, Dockstader.
Nays: Case.
David Madison can be reached at david@cowboystatedaily.com.
