Weston County Clerk Becky Hadlock argued in a Tuesday court filing that the Wyoming Attorney General’s office hasn’t shown the evidence of misconduct or malfeasance required to remove her from office.
“The chain of events leading to the filing of this petition is tortured and petty,” Hadlock’s attorney Ryan Semerad wrote in the filing.
Hadlock in November 2024 oversaw a botched general election, in which faulty ballots intermingled with proper ballots and skewed two races in which the candidates were running unopposed.
Hadlock took accountability at the time and hosted a hand recount to correct the errors by the time the election was certified officially.
She also filed a post-election audit in which she failed to detect 21 errors, which Secretary of State Chuck Gray has cast as potentially fraudulent, in multiple public statements on the matter.
Wyoming doesn’t have recall elections for county officials. Instead, it has governor’s investigations, of which there have been several lately.
Hadlock’s Tuesday filing is in response to the civil action Wyoming Attorney General Keith Kautz filed last month pushing for her removal from office. Kautz filed the action after Gov. Mark Gordon recommended Hadlock’s removal following his investigation, which was itself the result of complaints by Weston County electors.
Semerad argued in the motion that Kautz has failed to show Hadlock committed misconduct or malfeasance in office, and that Hadlock will win her case one way or another.
“Clerk Hadlock will ultimately be entitled to judgment as a matter of law on the State’s Petition – whether that judgment arrives before trial, after the State’s case-in-chief, or after an adverse verdict from the jury,” wrote Semerad. “And this entire process will have been an exercise in futility.”
Her Story
As part of Hadlock’s defense, Semerad tells the clerk’s version of the oft-repeated controversy, which has been ongoing for 16 months.
“Clerk Hadlock has never engaged in ‘misconduct or malfeasance in office’ justifying her summary removal at any time in her tenure as the Weston County Clerk,” wrote Semerad.
Ahead of the 2024 general election, Weston County contracted with Election Systems & Software (ES&S) for printing and formatting ballots, voting machine programming, and other election-related administrative tasks. That company outsources ballot printing to a third party, the filing says.
Hadlock noticed in 2024 that the printer had sent a ballot proof that looked incorrect: the spacing for House District 1 was wrong because it lacked language telling the voter that office was for a two-year term, and that skewed the marking bubbles so that the one next to the candidate’s name was one space too high on the ballot.
That candidate was Rep. and now House Speaker Chip Neiman, who later won his unopposed election.
Hadlock told ES&S of the problem and ordered a corrected ballot proof. The company shipped corrected ballots to Weston County.
Another ballot error went undetected until later: two Republican candidates running unopposed for two at-large Weston County Commission seats were listed in the same order. Their names didn’t alternate on different ballot copies as the machine anticipated they would.
Their votes were mixed on election day.
Also on election day, because of the faulty ballots intermixed in the election, the machine count showed Neiman receiving 166 votes and 1,289 undervotes — or ballots leaving his race blank — in the Weston County race. Neiman’s district also covers all of Crook County.
At about 9 or 9:30 p.m. on election night, Nov. 5, Gray told Hadlock she and her team were excused for the night, so Hadlock went home and to bed at about 10 p.m., Semerad’s filing says.
An unknown number rang Hadlock’s cellphone at midnight. She ignored it since she didn’t recognize the number, says the filing.
Later, a number Hadlock recognized rang her cellphone: the number of Weston County Sheriff Bryan Colvard.
Alarmed thinking something must have happened, Hadlock got out of bed to take Colvard’s call.
The sheriff told her Gray had tried to reach her, and he asked her to call Gray back, over concerns with the unofficial election results.
Hadlock called Gray and Gray said he’d seen a large undervote in Neiman’s race that concerned him.
That large undervote tally for Neiman was “odd” Semerad’s filing acknowledges.
Hadlock was puzzled and had no reason to believe something had gone wrong in the election, says the filing.
Gray said he’d call Hadlock back, but he did not that night, says the filing. Hadlock went to bed around 3 or 4 a.m.
In the morning hours Gray called Platte County Clerk Malcolm Ervin to discuss the issue instead, wrote Semerad.
Later that morning Hadlock, Ervin and ES&S representative Justin Blow joined Gray on a phone call to discuss the issue.
Blow explained in another call with Ervin that “previous ballot versions” had been introduced at voting sites in Weston County. Blow offered to reprogram the machines to read the alternate ballots, but Hadlock decided to conduct a hand recount, says the filing. She also postponed her election canvass date to Nov. 8, 2024, to complete the recount.
Other clerks helped with the hand count.
Gray sent Hadlock a list of 75 ballot numbers to be audited as part of the post-election audit process.
Hadlock sent her audit results around 4:10 p.m. Nov. 6, 2024, wrote Hadlock.
She now believes she conducted that post-election audit incorrectly by inadequately comparing the cast-vote records to the ballot images, wrote Semerad.
She didn’t detect any of the errors later found on 21 of those 75 ballots, he added.
The attorney wrote that Hadlock attributes this to her “divided attention” which included juggling four major issues: the strange undervote, the ES&S report that three ballot versions had made it to different voting sites, managing the hand count, and postponing the canvass by one day.
The audit results weren’t due until Nov. 12, 2024, wrote Semerad.
“In short, Clerk Hadlock had time to fix any errors in her post-election audit,” he added. “She had almost no time to address the four major issues that went to the heart of the 2024 general election itself: the ultimate results of that election.”
She conducted a post-election audit Nov. 12 and submitted the results – with the 21 faulty ballots detected – that morning, the filing says.
Buckle In
The 1926 Wyoming case of State v. Scott lends legal clarity to the state’s governor’s investigations.
It says the state has to prove a county officer is guilty of misconduct or malfeasance, which can include “habitual inattention;” and the function of Wyoming’s governor’s investigation and removal law isn’t to punish an official, but to relieve the public of an officer believed to be unfit to perform the duties of her office because of her misconduct.
The law also says that for the governor to recommend an official for removal, she must be guilty of “misconduct or malfeasance in office.”
On The Road
A group of Weston County electors starting in late 2024 asked Gov. Mark Gordon to investigate Hadlock and recommend her removal from office.
Gordon did not investigate Hadlock for filing an inaccurate post-election ballot audit, because none of the qualified electors had complained of that at the time.
Gray had submitted a complaint about that, but his complaint wasn’t valid to Gordon’s investigation since Gray isn’t a Weston County elector or Weston County Commissioner. Electors and commissioners of the relevant county are the people Wyoming law authorizes to file complaints for governor’s investigations for removals of county officials.
Semerad put it like this:
“Secretary of State Chuck Gray, despite having no authority to do so, also demanded that the Governor remove Clerk Hadlock from office” under the governor’s investigation law.
Gordon declined in May 2025 to recommend Hadlock for removal, saying the mix-up with the ballots didn’t rise to the level of misconduct or malfeasance.
“Secretary Gray took his grievances and his 94-page report on the road over the summer and fall of 2025,” wrote Semerad. First, Gray spoke at the Management Audit Committee’s July 9, 2025, meeting in Cheyenne to provide an “additional topic” contemplating whether Hadlock had engaged in “misconduct” during the election, the filing says.
The committee voted to form a subcommittee to investigate Hadlock’s post-election audit.
It later subpoenaed Hadlock to attend its Sept. 29, 2025, meeting, despite Hadlock having warned legislative staff before the meeting and before the subpoena was issued that she had medical appointments and couldn’t attend.
Semerad has argued that the committee exceeded its authority in issuing this subpoena. He revived that argument in Tuesday’s filing.
When Hadlock didn’t come to the meeting Sept. 29, 2025, the committee asked the Natrona County Sheriff’s Office to investigate her failure to appear. The sheriff’s office did, and Hadlock is now facing a criminal charge for failure to appear for a legislative subpoena.
That case is ongoing.
New Complaints
Then, a group of Weston County electors last autumn submitted new complaints about Hadlock, this time adding claims about the post-election audit and Hadlock’s failure to appear for the legislative meeting.
With those new parts of the controversy, Gordon announced Jan. 7 that Hadlock’s actions rise to the level of misconduct or malfeasance that justifies a removal case.
Those two new claims against her regarding the audit and the subpoena add to Gordon’s prior “findings of incompetence,” the governor announced.
“Taken together they contribute to the appearance of misconduct or malfeasance,” he wrote. Still, he added, she didn’t show “any malicious intent to change the outcome of the election.”
Her failure to appear for the subpoena combined with other issues during the election season show, Gordon wrote, “at best an inattentiveness to detail and at worst a disregard for her responsibilities as County Clerk.”
Semerad now argues that these claims aren’t enough to show that Hadlock “corruptly violated” her duties and should be removed.
For example, he wrote, the faulty Nov. 6, 2024, post-election audit couldn’t have impacted the outcome of any race because Hadlock had by then already decided to conduct a full hand recount.
Kautz’s “most muscular theory – that Clerk Hadlock submitted a false post-election audit and covered up errors in the ballots she audited” contrast with Gordon’s findings that she didn’t try to sabotage the election, added Semerad.
He also wrote that her “nonappearance” at the legislative meeting last September was a matter pertaining to her capacity as an individual, and so not workable under the statute letting the state remove county officials for misconduct or malfeasance “in office.”
Semerad is asking the court to purge references to that meeting and her failure to appear from Kautz’s removal petition, as invalid pleadings.
“The State’s allegations amount to mere negligence or technical violations of a statutory duty, which are insufficient grounds upon which a court may find a county officer guilty of ‘misconduct or malfeasance in office,’” wrote Semerad.
This case is ongoing.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
