Of the 22 election-reform bills for which Wyoming’s secretary of state expressed strong support when meeting with state legislators Thursday in Lander, a legislative committee chose to take up 10 for study.
Lawmakers listed 11 but said they’d combine two of those, for a possible load of 10 bills.
That doesn’t guarantee that the legislative Corporations Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee will carry all of them into the 2026 legislative session that starts Feb 9.
Individual legislators still can champion some of the bills that didn’t reach the committee’s threshold of interest.
The bills the committee will study in the coming months contemplate:
• The use of pen and paper ballots as the default in Wyoming elections.
• Prohibiting ballot drop boxes.
• Restricting who can deliver a person’s ballot to the clerk on that person’s behalf.
• Requiring random hand count audits of election results.
• Requiring hand counts for recounts.
• A list of provisions colloquially termed the “poll watcher’s bill of rights.”
• Requiring independent candidates to swear that they are not registered as a partisan voter.
• Clarifying procedures for testing voting machines.
• Repealing school identification cards as acceptable voter identification.
• Requiring true photo ID to vote.
• Election transparency.
Huge Demonstration
Fremont County Clerk Juile Freese has been in her elected seat for 30 years, and has been involved in running Wyoming elections for 45 years.
She let the committee members vote in a mock election, during which she walked them through every step of the elections process using an electronic voting machine, an electronic ballot marker and a computer wholly disconnected from the internet that she said compiles the vote totals.
Lawmakers voted on which pets are the best, whether they enjoy spring break and which school subject was their favorite.
There were several write-ins for favorite pet, and dogs weren’t on the ballot.
Freese described a rigorous election process.
Roughly, voters check in, contributing to a total ballot count. They present identification. They vote — their ballots run through the machine and they have a chance to cure their ballot if they did something wrong, such as an overvote.
Election officials keep track of the number of ballots processed and the number counted, and call the person who left with his or her ballot or threw it away before voting to see what went wrong and account for the missing ballot and achieve “balance,” said Freese.
The vote totals are compiled on the disconnected computer. The ballots are also stored.
A never-before-used, made-in-America encrypted jump drive uploads the ballot totals.
The votes are subject to seals and a rigorous chain of command accounting as they’re taken to Freese’s office, where she loads the totals onto her computer and sends those to a secure email at the secretary of state’s office. She also dispatches those unofficial vote counts to the public.
The clerks aren’t required to identify and count the write-ins in races where they don’t make a difference, she noted.
But they count them when they do.
A clerk-appointed canvassing board meets days later to certify the election.
Weston County
Wyoming passed multiple election reforms in 2025, such as requiring proof of citizenship and proof of Wyoming residency for 30 days to vote.
Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray said many more reforms are still needed.
He listed 22 failed bills from 2025 of which he’s “a big fan.” These topics range from phasing out electronic voting machines to requiring photo ID only to making pen-to-paper ballots the default over electronic marking machines.
Gray discussed a miscount in last year’s general election that showed House Speaker Chip Neiman, R-Hulett, as receiving just 15% of the votes cast for him even though he was running unopposed.
Nearly all of the other 85% of the ballots in his district were marked as not voting in the race. It was determined that Weston County Clerk Becky Hadlock mistakenly mixed in ballots containing errors that were printed before the election with correct ballots on Election Day.
At the time, Hadlock took responsibility for the mistake, but told Cowboy State Daily shortly after she had no plans to resign because of it.
Gray has since called for her resignation.
Gov. Mark Gordon has launched an investigation, which is pending.
Gray told the committee that a post-election audit didn’t catch the irregularities, and he said he can only theorize two reasons for why that is: either no audit was done, or the results weren’t reported honestly.
Baby, Bathwater
Detractors to the extensive election-reform agenda, however, worried that too much zeal toward catching ineligible voters and other bad actors could also keep eligible voters from the ballot box.
Tom Lacock, associate state director at AARP Wyoming, said his group supports a proposed 2025 bill aimed at requiring photo identification — but with amendments to let people (particularly people in nursing homes) fill out a hardship exemption form.
Gray had mentioned in his testimony that in a color-coded map of election security on X, Wyoming is in the yellow, not the green, “true photo ID” compliant color category.
Lacock said his group is comfortable with disallowing Medicare and Medicaid cards as lawful voter ID as long as there’s an adequate substitute to help these people vote.
He cited what he called an anecdotal poll of county clerks, in saying about 300 Wyoming voters used those cards to vote recently.
And he claimed Gray is comfortable with removing eligible voters from the rolls.
“We’re all on the same team when it comes to making sure only qualified electors vote in Wyoming elections,” said Lacock. “My hope is we don’t remove too many voters who’ve had the right to vote for many years, in our zeal to make Wyoming another color on a map found on X.”
Gray later rebutted.
“I want to push back on the AARP testimony,” said Gray. “I did not say we’re OK with dropping anyone off the rolls.”
But, he added, the state needs solid voter identification requirements as a “commonsense” measure.
Gray also rebutted a concern by Gail Symons, a columnist and prominent advocate for eligible voter access. Symons said the right to vote should be safeguarded, just as any other right.
Lawmakers should weigh the bill offering a “poll watcher’s bill of rights” so that it doesn’t impede voter access in the name of serving poll watchers, she indicated.
“Poll watching is about protecting the election,” Gray countered.
After the meeting Gray texted Cowboy State Daily additional thoughts, calling the committee’s decision a triumph.
“Today’s meeting and all the election integrity bill drafts moving forward are a huge win for election integrity and continued improvements to Wyoming’s Election laws,” he said. “I'm thrilled that the committee advanced conservative election integrity bills suggested during my testimony, including bill drafts that require pen and paper ballots and require true photo ID for voter ID. I'm also pleased that the committee advanced bill drafts to ban ballot drop boxes and ban ballot harvesting.”
He said these bill drafts also promote President Donald Trump’s March executive order addressing election reforms.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
