Kudos to Secretary of State Chuck Gray for tirelessly pushing the legislature to fulfill the Wyoming constitutional mandate to “pass laws to secure the purity of elections, and guard against abuses of the elective franchise” (Wyo. Const. Art 6, Sec. 13).
He is relentlessly fulfilling the campaign promises that got him elected by a whopping 91.5 percent of the popular vote.
In this, his first full-throated General Session since assuming office, Gray supported legislation to make Wyoming’s elections a model for every state of the Union.
In the House alone, representatives filed more than a score of election bills. As the legislators left for home on Thursday, a half-dozen sat on the governor’s desk for his signature.
- HB 156 Proof of voter residency;
- HB 165 Ranked choice voting prohibition;
- HB 228 Prohibition on private funds for conducting elections;
- HB 318 Maintenance of voter lists;
- HB 337 Prohibition of foreign funding of ballot measures;
- and SF 78 Distribution of unsolicited absentee ballot request forms
These are all important measures to keeping Wyoming elections “open, free and equal,” as promised in Sec. 27 of our Declaration of Rights.
Not Every Bill Made It
Of course, not every good bill made it to the finish line.
HB0154 False voting-amendments passed the House 60-0, and the Senate 29-2. But it never made it to the governor’s desk because the two chambers couldn’t reconcile their different versions.
HB0206 Elections-acceptable identification revisions-2 sat in Senate President, Bo Biteman’s drawer for over two weeks before he assigned it to committee. Predictably, even though the Corporations committee sent it to the floor unanimously, it was too late to be considered.
Three more House Bills died because Biteman never assigned them to committees.
HB 157 Proof of voter citizenship,
HB 232 Elections-hand counting for recounts,
and HB 245 Pen and paper ballots died after spending three to four lonely weeks in the President’s drawer.
But HB 160 Voter identification-revisions did come out of the drawer after three weeks and get assigned to a committee, where it died for lack of action.
There were a few House bills that did make it to the Senate floor.
HB 131 Ballot drop boxes-prohibition and HB 238 Ballot harvesting prohibition came out of committee in plenty of time.
But somehow, for eight consecutive days Majority Floor Leader, Tara Nethercott just couldn’t manage to get them on the floor.
Similarly, HB 249 Runoff elections cleared committee with hours to spare but never came to a floor vote.
It’s not that anybody did anything wrong. But after all is said and done, where there’s a will, there’s a way. And Senate leaders exhibited lack of will.
Pure And Secure Elections
Despite the loss of these bills in the Senate, their time in the House did great things for Wyoming’s efforts to make our elections the most pure and secure in the Union.
First of all, they opened up floor debate on numerous issues that, before now, had been largely stifled. It is one thing to repeat the mantra that our elections are safe and secure. It is another thing to grapple publicly with the nitty-gritty of election conduct. This, alone, was worth the trouble.
Second, these nine bills validated the widespread popularity of common-sense measures. Before dying in the Senate, all nine of these election bills cleared a House committee and three readings on the floor.
Most cleared by a margin of 75 percent and more. No longer can anyone say that these are marginal issues of interest to no one.
Why The Uproar?
I have never understood why the Establishment reacts so convulsively whenever citizens ask reasonable questions about election security.
One would think that they would welcome the opportunity to discuss openly and in detail the intricacies of chain-of-custody, voter-list maintenance, and electronic voting systems. Instead, they become apoplectic.
Hopefully, this year showed the legislature that you can have reasonable discussions about election integrity without the sky falling in.
Maybe, even, the Management Council will permit the Joint Interim Corporations and Election Committee to hear from experts in the field of computer technology.
Wyoming citizens deserve to have an open and informed discussion of the security vulnerabilities inherent in microscopic computer circuitry, hard-wired machine language, and software that can never be examined by elected officials.
Elections are the most momentous events in a constitutional republic.
An election is the moment when vast governmental powers are given into the hands of one’s fellow-citizens.
Citizens have the absolute right to know that those elections are pure and secure, and that no enemy of the public is enabled to abuse the franchise.
Kudos to all who ran election integrity bills. And thanks to Secretary of State Gray for his tireless work in advancing the ball.
Jonathan Lange is a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastor in Evanston and Kemmerer and serves the Wyoming Pastors Network. Follow his blog at https://jonathanlange.substack.com/. Email: JLange64@protonmail.com.
