Wyoming committee hears hours of testimony on Senate File 184 to ban electronic voting equipment

CHEYENNE — The Wyoming Senate Corporations, Elections & Political Subdivisions Committee spent an evening hearing public testimony on Senate File 184, a measure that would prohibit use of certain electronic voting equipment and require hand counting of paper ballots for state elections.

Supporters and opponents laid out sharply different views of the state’s current voting system, with witnesses testifying about local testing failures, alleged vulnerabilities in ES&S equipment, and the logistics and costs of switching to hand counts.

The bill’s proponents said the state’s electronic systems are opaque and occasionally unreliable. “SF 184 eliminates all these problems,” said Richard Weber, operations manager of BCR Voter Initiatives and a Story, Wyoming, resident. Weber told senators clerks cannot inspect key internal machine logs, that vendor source code is held externally and inaccessible, and that county clerks rely on out-of-state vendors who are not sworn election officials. He said hand counts reduce complexity and liability for county clerks and cited his experience running control hand-count tables.

Other supporters described local incidents they said raised security concerns. Elena Campbell of Sheridan County recounted an incident in which a precinct worker received a text with an unofficial…