In some of the last votes they’ll make as state lawmakers, several Wyoming Freedom Caucus members and allies voted Thursday to sponsor a slate of legislation to revamp the state’s election system.
At a legislative committee meeting in Casper, the group of Republican lawmakers also rejected a resolution intended to combat dark money — a political force the caucus has blamed for voters overwhelmingly rejecting their candidates in the 2026 primary election.
Since the Freedom Caucus rose to power, a core part of its mission has included reshaping how elections are carried out in Wyoming. That focus has largely been aimed at restricting how and when people can vote. Some of those proposals succeeded at the statehouse, including 2025 legislation that added proof of residency and citizenship to the documents needed to register to vote.
Other bills, however, including a ban on ballot drop boxes and measures to count votes by hand, have failed time and again. And after the caucus lost its House majority and backslid in the Senate in the primary election, those bills are unlikely to succeed in the 69th Wyoming Legislature.
“One delicate issue is that there’s been an election in the intervening time between when these bills were proposed,” Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee Co-Chairman Cale Case said at Thursday’s meeting. The Lander Republican won his primary election against a caucus-aligned challenger.
“I believe that has real implications on how these bills will be received in the 2027 session,” Case said, adding that he did not think they would clear initial hurdles in the session’s process.
While Case is not associated with the caucus, most of the committee’s current membership is. His comments came in the late afternoon as lawmakers had reached the election portion of the agenda, which included consideration of 13 bills. When Case asked the committee how it would like to proceed, Casper Republican Rep. Tony Locke, a Freedom Caucus member who lost his reelection, asked for each bill to be heard and voted on.
Lyman Republican Rep. Joe Webb, another Freedom Caucus member who lost in August, also asked that the committee forge ahead.
“If another Legislature deems that these bills are not necessary, that is their responsibility and that falls upon their shoulders and not ours,” he said. “But I think we have the due diligence to proceed,” he said.
Altogether, the committee voted to sponsor eight bills and move four more to its November meeting for consideration. The sponsored measures would ban drop boxes, restrict how ballots can be delivered and revise acceptable forms of voter ID, among other things.
Ten Sleep Republican Sen. Ed Cooper, who is not on the committee, brought a resolution for the panel to consider sponsoring.
“I do believe we have an election integrity problem in Wyoming and it comes down to money,” Cooper said.
More specifically, he said, dark money, or political spending where the source of funds is not publicly disclosed, is affecting elections across the country, including in Wyoming.
A large volume in dark money, in fact, was spent ahead of Wyoming’s 2026 primary election, including by groups both opposing and supporting the Freedom Caucus.
Make Liberty Win, a Virginia-based political action committee, for example, spent $549,000 largely backing caucus candidates, as WyoFile previously reported. However, the PAC’s funding is obscured since it largely relies on funding from its nonprofit, Young Americans for Liberty, and is not required by federal law to publicly disclose its underlying individual donors.
Meanwhile, opposition to the caucus was better organized and funded than it was during the last election cycle, as WyoFile reported in August. That included the PAC for a Better Wyoming, which spent about $191,000 opposing the caucus, according to campaign finance reports. Details about the PAC’s funding remain unknown to the public since it reported that Wyoming Donor Alliance, a nonprofit, was the single source of its funding. The caucus recently blamed this type of spending for its election defeat.
At the meeting in Casper, Mills Mayor Leah Juarez told the committee dark money is no longer just a problem for statewide or national races.
“I’m here today because the mayoral election in Mills, Wyoming, a community of 5,000 people, has become the target of organized political activity funded through a political action committee from Wisconsin,” Juarez said.
“The public has a legitimate right to know who is paying to influence its mayoral elections as well as everybody else’s elections in this room,” she said.
Afton Republican Sen. Dan Dockstader brought a motion to move the legislation to the committee’s next meeting for a full discussion, public comment and notice.
No one spoke against the motion, or the bill’s concept, but it failed on a voice vote when the committee’s caucus associates opposed it.
Though Casper Republican Sen. Bill Landen did not run for reelection and is concluding his last term in January, he told the committee he’s hoping to see the state strengthen its campaign finance laws.
“I think there’s a lot of work to do in the Secretary of State’s office on this front. I don’t think that our disclosure methods are adequate enough,” he said.
The committee’s next meeting is scheduled for November.
