Uinta County committeeman Karl Allred reviews documents at a Wyoming Republican Party Central Committee meeting in Riverton in September 2022. Gov. Mark Gordon appointed Allred as secretary of state. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
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Election officials in the seven Wyoming counties where voters can cast ballots via drop boxes disregarded interim Secretary of State Karl Allred’s request to ditch the boxes. 

History:

Allred, a Uinta County Republican Party committeeman, made the request in the first week of his appointed secretary of state tenure via a letter to Wyoming’s 23 county clerks. The missive from the Evanston gas plant foreman lacked legal teeth and so the request could be ignored — and none of the counties that still use drop boxes for absentee ballots made any changes. 

Teton is one of seven Wyoming counties that allows voters to cast their ballots via drop boxes. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

Ballot drop boxes have been made controversial by unsubstantiated claims about election fraud. They were used without any evidence of fraud during the 2020 election in 11 Wyoming counties: Albany, Big Horn, Carbon, Converse, Fremont, Johnson, Laramie, Park, Sheridan, Sweetwater and Teton.

Four of those counties did away with their boxes prior to the 2022 primary and general elections: Big Horn, Park, Johnson and Sheridan, according to clerks in those counties. 

It is up to the discretion of county clerks to use drop boxes. 

In his letter Allred wrote that seven counties were still using ballot drop boxes. WyoFile’s outreach to county clerk offices suggests that several of those are “general” county boxes, where residents can leave items like vehicle registration payments, but also ballots. The seven counties are Albany, Carbon, Converse, Fremont, Laramie, Sweetwater and Teton, where clerks did not take action in response to Allred’s request.  

Who said what:

“Laramie County will continue operation of its drop box. With less than a month to the General Election, elimination of this safe, secure, and convenient way for voters to deliver their ballots to the County Clerk would be disruptive and result in a greater number of rejected ballots and votes,” Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee stated in a letter to Allred.

“Ours gets utilized quite a bit. I definitely didn’t feel like it was fair to the voters to remove it,” Converse County Clerk Karen Rimmer.

Mike Koshmrl reports on Wyoming's wildlife and natural resources. Prior to joining WyoFile, he spent nearly a decade covering the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s wild places and creatures for the Jackson...

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  1. Reply

  2. The drop box cheating in Laramie County isn’t enough to effect the state. Drop boxes like the idiocy of fighting voter ID just make folks not trust elections.

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  4. The more the better off everyone is. Our democracy depends on everyone’s ability to do the right thing and get out to vote! The anti democracy crowd can’t stand it because voting gives voice to the fact many don’t buy the Wyoming road apples many are passing out as truth. It a easy and convenient way to show the ultra right their ideas are false as their claims of voter fraud are just old road apples Tuesday November 8 we get our say. Let’s start electing people out to fix the real problems Wyoming is facing and let the MAGA’S ban and burn books and find all the cat litter boxes in our schools!

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    1. Voting is the answer – but “Road Apples” don’t just fall from the horse on the right but also, and in large quantity, from the horse on the left. You can despise the technology used to show the fraud perpetrated by some, not in Wyo, but you cannot refute its ability to accurately identify the truth of others actions. If you feel that spreading a new sexual moral compass through the written word is appropriate than do it for yours, but leave my grandkiddos and greatgrandkiddos out of it and do it privately with your own tribe, not publicly with the rest of ours.

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