By Hannah Shields
Wyoming Tribune Eagle
Via- Wyoming News Exchange

CHEYENNE — After three long meetings of public testimony, House committee members killed a bill that would ban the use of electronic voting machines in Wyoming elections late Wednesday night in an 8-1 vote.

A mirror bill also died in the Senate Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee earlier the same evening, after senators failed to advance the bill.

The sister committee in the Wyoming House of Representatives heard a cumulative three to four hours of public testimony over the course of three meetings on House Bill 215, “Prohibition on electronic voting equipment,” before concluding this topic should be saved for further study during the interim, the Legislature’s off season.

“I’ve talked with the grassroots group, and I think they’re amicable to furthering discussion beyond this bill,” said Chairman Rep. Chris Knapp, R-Gillette, “and coming up with something, maybe, for next session.”

A large grassroots movement spurred by the Wyoming Republican Party, supported by some county GOP committees, led to the creation of two mirror bills that would ban the use of electronic voting systems and move the state to a full hand count of its election ballots. 

Wyoming Freedom Caucus member Rep. Scott Smith, R-Lingle, introduced HB 215 on Jan. 31 as the result of “a large grassroots movement with the majority party.”

Hot Springs County GOP Chairwoman Cheryl Aguiar and Wheatland resident Jill Kauffman were recognized as co-sponsors of the bill.

Aguiar and Kauffman helped push a ballot initiative last summer to hand count all election ballots in Wyoming, the Jackson Hole News&Guide reported. Smith said it was his hope to expedite this process by going through the Legislature.

“As you can see, it’s like a family reunion in the room from all over the state,” Smith said, gesturing to the filled rows of chairs behind him. “(At) the state majority party convention, they created a resolution mandating that we, as a state, go to getting rid of all electronic voting equipment, and so that is my heart behind the matter.”

However, both House and Senate committee members concluded this was too heavy of a topic to push through the current legislative session without further study. Senate committee members hesitated to move Senate File 184, mirror to HB 215, after concluding public testimony during their second consecutive meeting on the bill that day.

“It’s a late hour to take this kind of complicated bill on,” said Sen. Dan Dockstader, R-Afton. “I’m not ready to move forward at this point, until we have a more in-depth look.”

Sen. Brian Boner, R-Douglas, said he also supported a more “incremental look” into this bill that would include input from county clerks. During public testimony, county clerks widely criticized the legislation as expensive, time consuming and ill thought out.

Sen. Darin Smith, R-Cheyenne, was the prime sponsor of Senate File 184, which mirrors language in HB 215. Smith said a hand counting system would save the state money and restore trust in Wyoming’s elections. Anyone with a sixth-grade level education could be trained as a hand counter within four hours, Smith said.

Several members of the public, testifying in favor of both bills, expressed distrust of electronic voting machines. 

Should these bills pass, Wyoming would be the first state in the country to shift to a full hand-count system of its elections.

“Did you know that Weston County had both human and machine errors? Humans handle everything,” Kaufman said. “They even program the machines.”

Weston County recently became the poster child in the effort to push for hand counting election results after the county clerk accidentally sent out the wrong printed ballot. The incorrect design on some of the ballots shifted the bubble answers down by one, resulting in an undercount of votes in a legislative race for Rep. Chip Neiman, R-Hulett, the current House speaker.

However, Fremont County Clerk Julie Freese previously testified in other committee meetings that the voting machine actually did its job by not counting the misaligned ballots.

“The machine did its job,” Freese said during a House Appropriations Committee meeting last week. “It saw the ones that were correct. The ballots that were not correct … those did not get counted because the bubble was in the wrong place.”

 

Hand counting ballots

Nearly all who testified in support of the House and Senate bills argued hand counting is a simple task that could save the state money. 

However, Campbell County Clerk Cindy Lovelace told both committees her county conducted a trial run of hand counting ballots on Oct. 4.

The test included two trials. The first trial included 10 teams of four people, counting 5% of the 19,000 ballots expected to be cast in the general election. Each person in the first trial received nearly six hours of training in hand counting.

The teams were asked to count 30 sample ballots from each of the county’s 37 precincts, totaling 1,110 ballots. Each team was responsible for counting the votes on a total of 60 ballots, or 30 ballots each from two precincts.

A single team of four people, with an average of 42.5 hours of training per person, counted 249 ballots in four hours, with 12 races per ballot. In summary, the 10 teams in the first test trial counted at a rate of 204 races per hour, per team. The team in the second trial, with seven times more training in hand counting, counted at a rate of 747 races per hour, Lovelace said.

Using these numbers, Lovelace said the best case scenario to hand count her county’s 2024 general election would cost $72,360, using 536 people who trained for six hours. If training hours were increased to 42.5 hours per person, the cost increases to $307,530, Lovelace said.

“These costs do not include our additional staffing hours for the elections office to facilitate and oversee the hand count process,” Lovelace said. “Keep in mind, these numbers would have to be doubled to account for the primary election, as well. And to further add to these costs, we must consider the recount and audit requirements in the election.”

She and other county clerks said there is also the issue of time. 

On Election Day, election judges work between 14 and 16 hours, starting their day before the sun rises and working until the polls close at 7 p.m. 

Both HB 215 and SF 184 required judges to begin counting right away, but the clerks said this was nearly impossible.

“My staff, at this point, when the polls close, have already been working for 15 hours,” Lovelace said. “We have 17 people, so that is a logistical issue that I have yet to see a solution for.”

She added her county alone would need between 500 and 2,000 people to count both the primary and general elections.

Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee said she “wholeheartedly agreed” with her colleagues, adding it would “upend” elections in her county.

She would need to recruit and train twice as many people, Lee said, plus search for additional warehouse space for paper ballots, since Laramie County currently uses touch-screen voting machines in its elections. Switching to a hand count would also mean educating voters how to use pen-and-paper ballots.

“I urge the committee to put this topic on an interim study,” Lee said. “Just a few years ago, Wyoming was touted as having the gold standard for elections. … Our system is not broken.”