LANDER—Wyoming lawmakers filed a record number of election-related bills in this winter’s general session, but they showed little sign of slowing down Thursday on plans to remake the state’s election system.
During its first meeting of the legislative off-season, the Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee voted to draft 10 pieces of election legislation. The bills range from banning ballot drop boxes and restricting independent candidates, to codifying hand-count audits of ballots and curtailing the use of student IDs and Medicaid and Medicare insurance cards as acceptable forms of voter identification.
The slate represents just a fraction of the 45 bills filed in 2025, but is a considerable number for a committee to undertake heading into a legislative budget session when bills face a steeper initial hurdle compared to a general session.
The legislation will, however, have the advantage of being well-trodden ground for lawmakers. Each of the 10 bills will be modeled after 2025 measures that failed only a few months ago. Several have long been hailed by Secretary of State Chuck Gray, who encouraged lawmakers Thursday to reconsider roughly 20 bills from the last session.
That was too big a bite for the committee.
“It’s kind of unrealistic for any committee to carry 20 bills into a session, especially a budget session,” Sen. Bill Landen, R-Casper, told the committee. “And we haven’t even touched on all the other issues we’ve got today.”
Electricity issues alongside 911 system funding and outage reporting were topics scheduled for that afternoon, while on Friday, the committee was set to discuss elected officials’ associations, public record laws and commercial transaction regulations.
Meanwhile, the secretary encouraged lawmakers to keep the door open on some of the more sweeping election measures from 2025, including a ban on all electronic election equipment, including voting machines, tabulators and pollbooks.
“It’s something that we really need to be examining,” Gray said when pressed by House Minority Floor Leader Rep. Mike Yin, D-Jackson, to clarify his stance on banning such equipment.
Gray also pointed to a forthcoming report from U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard regarding electronic voting equipment. The report is the result of an executive order by President Donald Trump from March that would largely put elections under presidential control.
Gray’s predecessor, Ed Buchanan, put considerable efforts into debunking misinformation about Wyoming’s electronic voting equipment, including publishing a collection of facts about election integrity and security on the office’s website. After Gray took office, the website vanished.
Ahead of the 2020 election, as the website detailed, Wyoming replaced its outdated voting equipment, none of which has the hardware or software required to allow internet connectivity, nor does the tabulation computer in each county have the hardware or software required to allow internet connectivity.
Gray’s comments Thursday followed a demonstration by several county clerks of the voting machines used across the state.
“We have no intention of swaying your opinions about electronic voting systems, or to sell you on anything,” Platte County Clerk Malcolm Ervin told the committee.
“Instead, we just want to provide information about what we are doing to allow you further context when you make decisions regarding those systems,” he said. “Again, our goal is not to lobby you, but our goal is to provide information.”
Ervin pointed to a survey published by the Wyoming Survey & Analysis Center at the University of Wyoming in November ahead of the general election. It found that almost 90% of Wyoming adults believed their county’s tally of ballots for president in the 2025 election would be very or somewhat reliable.
“This survey shows that confidence in elections grows when administrators of that election are close to home,” Ervin said.
As part of their demonstration, the clerks walked lawmakers through their election timeline, dotted with dozens of deadlines.
The clerks also used an electronic tabulator identical to the ones used in Wyoming’s elections to hold a mock election. Committee members filled out ballots deciding their favorite pet and school subject, and were then tasked with looking over the shoulders of election staff as they parsed out the results.
An identical election would be held at Baldwin Creek Elementary, Fremont County Clerk Julie Freese told lawmakers.
“You might be a tough crowd, but the toughest crowd you’ll ever find is the group of fifth graders,” Freese said. “You’ll get every question under the sun. They are pretty amazing.”
For about half the Joint Corporations Committee, this is their first term as lawmakers, so Thursday’s meeting was also their first interim meeting. Plus, the majority of the committee is now made up of members and allies of the Wyoming Freedom Caucus — the further-right wing of the Republican party in the Legislature. And most of the election bills of the 2025 session were sponsored by Freedom Caucus associates, who have said voters gave them a loud and clear mandate via the very system they want to reform.
Several of those voters testified at the meeting.
“The silent majority is finding their voice and speaking up and saying, ‘We need changes. We need things done,’” Patricia Junek told the committee.
Junek lost a bid for the Legislature in 2022, and has since led a charge in Campbell County to count ballots by hand.
“I’m not going to single out any one bill that was presented by our secretary of state. I support every single one of them,” Junek said.
But none of those bills focus on fixing the real issues with Wyoming’s elections, Phyllis Roseberry told the committee.
“We do have a problem, and that is that our people are not turning out to vote. Twenty-seven percent of eligible voters in Wyoming voted in the primary this last year,” Roseberry, a former Washakie County pollworker, said.
Roseberry was among the roughly 30 members of the League of Women Voters who filled the room in support of the county clerks.
The committee’s next meeting is set for August, when members will have the option to draft additional election-related bills. At the very least, the committee will discuss the possibility of removing political parties from the election code after the Wyoming Republican Party disregarded a state law and a Wyoming Supreme Court ruling at its officer elections in Cody last weekend. The matter is now the subject of a lawsuit.
Gray also pointed to a forthcoming report from U.S. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard regarding electronic voting equipment. The report is the result of an executive order by President Donald Trump from March that would largely put elections under presidential control. …………Seriously is there anyone with half a brain who would condone this. This is utterly ridiculous. Who voted for this guy? He’s more than half a bubble off. I’m referring to Gray, but you can put DJT in that same capacity, along with Gabbard and the reset of his appointees.
Why don’t we go to the mercantile and put gumballs in the glass jar marked for the candidate of our choice? It worked in the olden days.
As stated here: “We do have a problem, and that is that our people are not turning out to vote. Twenty-seven percent of eligible voters in Wyoming voted in the primary this last year,”
That statistic is from Wyo.gov, Secretary Gray’s office, and the same page shows only half of eligible voters are registered. These low numbers and Wyoming’s ranking of 35th of 50 states for turnout should be front and center for improving the voting process. So simple.
Gray and his “brain trust” solving issues that we don’t have. They’re making it harder to do so, but we need to vote him out!
yes
So my Question to the Secretary and Legislators is what are they doing to make it easier for Wyoming Citizens to vote? Seems most of there legislative agenda is making it harder. All in the name of honest elections which we already have. Wish they would have original thoughts around our election integrity and no take their “Marching orders from Washington “.
Onward into the Fog,
bill lee
Lander
Gray is paranoid. Wyoming’s election process is one of the best in the country. Sure there are issues occasionally but over all they are rare. Fixing problems with a bomb is just going to cause more problems plus it’ll cause a big mess to be cleaned up.
We need to go out and vote them out. Please register and vote. This is the only way for most of us to get change.
Election reform isn’t about fair elections- quite the opposite. They’re trying to disenfranchise voters that would vote against the unfreedom caucus.
When I was a young man, I was employed as a maintenance person with a commercial real estate company. One method my boss would use to rid himself of incompetent employees without actually firing them would be to have them clean a property’s sidewalk with a toothbrush.
Here we have a committee gleefully doing the same kind of menial task, overseen by a supervisor who thinks that’s actually the best way to “clean the sidewalk.”
Brilliant…
This is a huge waste of time and resources dedicated to an imaginary problem. It is equivalent to the US House of Representatives prioritizing renaming the Gulf of Mexico over serious issues. It would be stupid to hand-count ballots. I agree with Roseberry, voters need to show up at the polls to vote.
I’ve lived in Wyoming a long time and one thing I would say about Wyoming people we are pretty honest and straightforward. I would say pretty much without exception the elected county clerks we have take their jobs seriously and do their best to run problem free elections. Why they would want to run a crooked election is more work than they would want to bring upon themselves. The only problem we have with elections is Secretary of State Chuck Gray and his own paranoid proclivities.
Gray will not be happy until he has his freedom caucus goons with firearms standing over us making sure we vote the way trump has told him to have us vote. Oh Lord, I hope he is not our next governor.
Well said
It’s your own fault for electing such idiotic clowns…