CHEYENNE — Is there such a thing as too many election bills?
In my opinion the answer is yes.
During the past legislative session, more than 40 election bills were filed, but only a few survived to reach Gov. Mark Gordon’s office.
Many of those bills came from Secretary of State Chuck Gray, who is the state's chief election officer.
Ordinarily, such a cascade of bills would signify horrible problems with Wyoming’s electoral system, like people faking IDs, trying to vote more than once, or trying to jimmy voting machines.
Wyoming, however, has had a pretty good record for running clean elections.
I bet the state could survive for many years without the need for any of these bills.
Gray announced last month that he is supporting another batch of election bills when the Legislature meets in February for the short budget session. They will be his first priority - after the budget, of course.
Pushing all these bills through the process eats up a lot of precious time in the short budget session.
This is time that should be devoted largely to the budget and emergency bills. That was the original intent of the Wyoming Legislature when it created the budget session.
Since then it has been expanded to become another general session that has been chaotic, with only half the time to devote to bill study and debate.
At least ten election bills have been readied by the Joint Interim Committee on Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions. Others, to be offered by individual legislators, will follow.
The committee proposals will be started in the House, which is controlled by the right wing Freedom Caucus by a simple majority.
The Freedom Caucus's challenge will be to cobble together enough votes to meet the required two-third majority for the bills to be considered.
The big emphasis now in Gray’s package is real photo IDs, which may be the most controversial, because it could prevent a large segment of voting age people from casting ballots.
The package also includes a ban on drop boxes and ballot collection, hand counts of audits and recounts, and a ban on dual citizenship voting, according to the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle.
The latter means a voter must declare sole citizenship in the US.
The bill that drew my attention mentioned hand counting.
If you have ever played cards and were the dealer, you know how hard it is to keep count. How many times did you have to start over?
Think of this on a larger scale - counting hundreds or thousands of ballots before an election winner can be declared. It means long nights, waiting and waiting, just like the old days before machines.
Some of the dark thinkers maintain this is part of a national extreme right wing plan to ultimately allow only white, male Christian nativists to vote, kind of like the old days before civil rights and women’s suffrage.
These bills represent a national movement, with many other states dealing with the same set of election bills that restrict voting rights.
They have added nearly100 of these laws in the ten years since the U.S. Supreme Court Supreme court gutted the Voting Rights Act, according to the Brennan Center on Justice.
The number jumped after the 2020 election and unsupported claims of voter fraud. (The Brennan Center called the claims “lies.”)
The decision in the case “Shelby County v. Holder” removed the guardrail that protected voters against discriminatory voting politics.
“Along with a prior decision narrowly interpreting constitutional protections for voting rights,” the Brennan Center reported, “Shelby County also sent a message to the nation that the federal courts would no longer play their historic role as a robust protector of voting rights.”
“As a result, the country has witnessed a barrage of restrictive voting legislation over the course of the last decade, reaching a fever pitch after the 2020 election and showing no signs of abating,” the center reported.
And so it goes. But the election bills and other non-emergency proposals - and there are plenty of them - should not be allowed to gobble up time in the short session.
Contact Joan Barron at 307-632-2534 or jmbarron@bresnan.net
