This really happened, you can’t make this stuff up.
In Park County, epicenter of Freedom Caucus and MAGA bluster, home to the nincompoops that are trying to tell Wyoming how to conduct our elections, the county assessor resigned then the dumpster caught fire.
According to current Wyoming statutes (which, for reasons you will soon see, need to be changed and pronto), when a vacancy in a county office occurs, the party of the former occupant comes up with a list of names for a replacement. Then the county commission chooses the new official from among those names.
That sounds simple enough, but the Park County Republican Party managed to screw up that simple task. Big time.
I like to call these bozos the Park County Republican Men’s Full Gospel Gun & Glee Club, and they are a reliable source for satirical column fodder. When they tried to hold an election to choose nominees to fill the assessor’s vacancy, they shot themselves squarely in the foot.
First of all, they couldn’t follow the simple instructions for filling out their ballots. I guess they thought to themselves, “We don’t need no steenking instructions, we’re goddam Republicans and nobody tells us what to do.”
Then they couldn’t even count the ballots. These are the same folks who stomp their feet and whine that all ballots in Wyoming should be hand counted because of those unreliable George Soros/Chinese Commie voting machines that cost Trump an election.
They couldn’t even count their own ballots by hand, yet they want the rest of Wyoming to trust their fumbling trigger fingers to count all our ballots. Like I said, you can’t make this stuff up.
So the Republican Party leaders went before the Park County Commission with egg on their faces to confess that they screwed up the election so badly that the commission or the courts need to straighten it out. Lawsuits have been filed because of the Republican Party’s ineptitude.
Then along comes rookie Freedom Caucus Rep. Laurie Bratten, R-Sheridan, to ratchet up the weirdness. She will introduce a bill to solve this problem by giving MORE authority to the parties to fill political vacancies.
What Rep. Bratten seems to fail to understand in her zeal to amplify the political power of the Republican Party in the Cowboy State, is that a vacant seat on a public body doesn’t belong to the party. That seat belongs to the citizens of the district.
An election victory doesn’t give a seat to a party’s candidate, it merely permits that candidate to occupy that seat temporarily. A vacancy, for whatever reason, returns that seat to the citizens to fill as they please.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Wyoming’s election code (Title 22) should be amended to remove the private organizations that we call political parties from almost every aspect of our elections. The parties’ responsibility should begin and end with their providing candidates for our general elections. And nobody should care how they go about that chore.
Once the parties have done that, they should bow out.
If a vacancy occurs in a public office, citizens should fill that vacancy with a special election. Critics of that arrangement who want to maintain the political strength of the parties will say that special elections are cumbersome and expensive.
But to me, special elections are far cleaner and more honest than the dumpster fire that is happening now in Park County.
To pass a law giving the Park County Republican Men’s Full Gospel Gun & Glee Club even more authority over Wyoming’s elections is just a booger-eatin’ stupid idea. Selah.
