A new Wyoming ballot petition launched by Brent Bien, Cheryl Aguiar and Rich Weber seeks to require manual tabulation of votes in Wyoming elections.
This is an even worse idea than the other ballot initiative the trio is backing: one that would cut residential property taxes in half.
However, it probably won’t be difficult to gather signatures for the petition for a manual recount. Former President Donald Trump has spent the past four years claiming without evidence that he was the victim of massive voter fraud in 2020. Many MAGA supporters were furious and still believe this, despite state and federal courts rejecting more than 60 election lawsuits.
Trump won 70% of the vote in Wyoming, his largest margin of victory in any state. Gray, a former state legislator from Casper, based his winning campaign for 2022 Secretary of State on the wild idea that Wyoming’s elections are plagued by unspecified “tremendous problems.”
Despite this alleged widespread voter fraud, neither Gray nor the many other Wyoming Republican candidates who have won office since 2020 have expressed the slightest doubt about the results of their own races. Funny how that works.
Gray told the Park County Board of Commissioners that state law says each county board “may adopt,” either experimentally or permanently, at any election or at all polling places within the county, any electronic voting system authorized by law.
Apparently, in Gray’s twisted logic, the use of “may” means that the boards could also decide to recount all ballots by hand.
He also seems to think that making it harder to vote by banning ballot drop boxes would give more “integrity” to our elections, which are already perfectly secure and accurate.
But Gray was rebuffed by the group representing Wyoming county clerks, who rejected his argument that ballot boxes are somehow illegal because they are inanimate objects. (Mr. Clerk: So are mailboxes, and your office approves them even though they are not nearly as secure as ballot drop boxes.)
Jill Kaufman recently hosted an event on election integrity in Wheatland. According to Jasmine Hall of the Jackson Hole News&Guide, she is concerned about counterfeit and hacked votes, viruses or improper programming, the inability to see ballots up close and personal, and electronic poll books being shut down and registered voter information being lost. Her concerns were widely shared by Rick Weible, a computer consultant who spoke at the event and claimed to have found a staggering 1,878 “vulnerabilities” in Wyoming’s electronic voting equipment.
“There are so many people who don’t trust the electronic voting machine system that they are almost saying they are not going to vote,” Kaufman said. “And that is just unacceptable.”
Of course, they don’t trust electronic voting machines: The former president, Wyoming’s top election official, and a fleet of political operatives like Wiebel (who was involved in a similar hand-recount effort in neighboring South Dakota) have been telling them not to for years.
Proponents of the hand recount argue that it is cheaper, faster and more accurate than electronic equipment like the Election Systems & Software machines used in Wyoming’s 23 counties, South Dakota and many other states.
In fact, according to many organizations that have conducted extensive research on both types of tabulations, manual counts are far more expensive, laboriously slow, and contain more errors.
Below are some of their findings:
Brennan Center for Justice — “In a Rice University experiment using just 120 paper ballots, people who counted by hand got it right just 58 percent of the time. Now imagine multiplying that result by 100 or 1,000. As a Bipartisan Policy Center report put it, humans, unlike counting machines, are “notoriously bad at completing routine, repetitive tasks.”
Voting Rights Lab — “Requiring election officials to hand-count every ballot is an extreme proposal that would be far more expensive, cause significant delays, and, most troubling, lead to higher error rates and heighten voter concerns about corruption.”
The U.S. Democracy Center — Shasta County, California, held two mock elections to prepare for a hand-count election this year that was canceled. Processing the county’s average of 53,000 ballots, each with at least 17 contests and ballot propositions, would have cost about $658,925 and required hiring 375 additional employees for the presidential primary alone. Wyoming’s last presidential election had nearly 280,000 ballots.
Gray supports an effort that has failed three times, most recently in April, to convince the five Republicans on the Park County Board of Commissioners to approve a hand recount of ballots. The Platte County Republican Party passed a resolution supporting the return of paper ballots and hand recounts, which was later approved by the state GOP.
That shows how uninformed or hypocritical the state Republican Party is. Wyoming counties already conduct elections with paper ballots that are counted by electronic counting machines. Votes on paper ballots are recorded on the scanner and the ballots are stored securely for auditing and verification of results. Counties can track each ballot.
The machines do not have the necessary hardware or software to enable Internet connectivity and are only accessible to authorized personnel, such as county clerks.
Wyoming law requires testing of equipment before elections and a post-election audit. Both processes are open to the public, but county clerks report few attendees. People with concerns about election integrity should take advantage of these opportunities to see how procedures they say are riddled with errors are actually used.
A statistical audit of the 2022 primary election verified that the electronic tabulation was 100% accurate.
I think a 100% error-free result should be enough proof of the integrity of the election for even the most ardent Trump supporter, but then I remember that I live in Wyoming and realize that’s not the case. There will always be voters in Wyoming who don’t accept the results when their candidates lose. In Wyoming’s 2020 presidential election, many were clearly unhappy that Trump only edged out Biden by 120,000 votes.
Weber, one of the petition’s Wyoming organizers, told an audience in Wheatland that the entire statewide recount could be completed within an hour of polls closing because only about 225,000 registered voters participate in the election and people could tabulate throughout the day.
Yes sir, let’s give everyone a ballot and start counting!
