As they have before, lawmakers gathered Friday to debate a bevy of bills aimed at redesigning the state’s elections. And like before, hours of testimony before the Wyoming Legislature’s Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee appeared to do little to change anyone’s mind.
Those who have aligned themselves with Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray and his election-reform agenda were steadfast, while those who have been skeptical of the years-long pursuit to revamp the state’s elections remained skeptical.
Lawmakers filed 45 election-related bills in the 2025 general election — accounting for about 8% of all legislation in both the House and the Senate. A fraction became law.
In May, the committee voted to reanimate 10 of the bills after Gray asked lawmakers to consider roughly 20 bills from the last session. Then an 11th election-related bill was added to Friday’s agenda.
“It’s probably the thing that Wyoming gets right more than anything in the whole country, is our elections. And we have for a long time, and we keep messing with it,” committee co-chairman Sen. Cale Case, R-Lander, said at the meeting in Casper.
Ultimately, a majority of the committee saw things differently from Case, voting to sponsor three pieces of legislation and draft a new version of a fourth to be discussed at a November meeting.
As for the seven other bills revived in May, the committee voted to make the final decision on their fate at the November meeting. Lingle Republican Sen. Cheri Steinmetz offered that suggestion as the meeting ran long.
“I really think these are important bills, and we have a lot of public testimony on some of these, and then we’ll also have to work them,” she said.
One of the bills to earn the committee’s sponsorship would require counties to use pen and paper as the default method to mark ballots for elections in Wyoming. For 22 of the state’s 23 counties, the bill would have little effect.
In Laramie County, where touch-screen voting machines have long been used, the change could “completely upend” elections, according Debra Lee, the local county clerk.
The committee also voted to sponsor a bill banning ballot drop boxes and to move a bill to the next meeting to ban ballot harvesting. Gray has had his sights on the two prohibitions since running for secretary of state in 2022.
Lastly, lawmakers voted to adopt a bill to clean up language related to Wyoming’s new voter registration law requiring proof of state residency and U.S. citizenship during voter registration. A federal court recently tossed a lawsuit challenging the new requirements as unconstitutionally vague and imposing an undue burden on the right to vote.
The committee’s next meeting is Nov. 3 in Cheyenne.
Our ELECTED officials are telling us the past elections that imposed them on us were fraudulent?
Why now, and why change what isn’t broken? The current voting system certified our elections, our voices were heard and Leaders were chosen under the current rules. If we already have a system that works, why invest time and taxpayer resources in rewriting the script rather than reinforcing trust in what functions well? It’s time to ask: Are we upholding integrity, or manufacturing fear? Chuck Grey what is your goal here, would you explain your bottom line or should we just assume duplicity?
Wyoming Is REAL ID Compliant. Chuck Knows That. So What’s His Real Motive?
Wyoming has been REAL ID compliant since 2011. That’s a fact. Our licenses already meet federal security standards. This isn’t a pending issue. It’s a settled one.
Yet Chuck Gray continues to push bills that pretend otherwise.
Why?
When you already have secure elections, and your counties are following the law, why pour more time, money, and fear into the system?
Here’s a thought: Chuck Gray may be laying the groundwork for a run for governor. If that’s the case, we deserve to ask the obvious, is this about election integrity, or is it about Chuck?
Real leadership doesn’t waste public trust chasing headlines. Real leadership respects our clerks, our counties, and our voters.
Wyoming elections work. Do we really have to fix what is not broken?
Beware of kissing trump’s behind, the emperor has no clothes.
Mail-in ballots are cheap and accessible (Trump’s [Putin’s] hoax against them notwithstanding).
Oregon has been conducting their elections via mail for years. Let’s replicate what they do.
If paper ballots become our election method, I wonder if Mr. Gray would hire me to help count? I doubt I’d make it past the interview stage, even though I can read and count. Obfuscation seems to be the order of the day when talking about fraud in elections.
Trump says Putin (yes the murderer Putin) says that you can’t have fair elections with mail in ballots. Where am I?
So many bills on voting requirements. I assume that their end game is you can’t vote unless you can demonstrate that you’re a member of the Freedom Caucus.
2026 cannot come soon enough. We need to do some serious research before the next voting season. Our state has become a political clown show. This is sad.
What a waste of time and money. A solution in search of a problem that doesn’t exist. Show any kind of actual evidence with documentation of where this has been a problem in WY in the past.
In reverence to their King Trump, these anti-Freedom Caucus jesters must do his bidding to make it harder to elect a truly representative government. It just all speaks to their quest to establish an Authoritarian regime in the US. Our first effort should be to vote them out of our democracy before they prevent us from voting altogether.
The clown show goes on, and on.