Senate Republicans met in Washington last Tuesday to preserve power for the establishment.
Leadership that sandbagged the Save America Act for seven months, including Wyoming’s senior senator, John Barrasso, fought off grassroots attempts at holding them accountable for the midterm bloodbath that flipped 100% of contested seats and handed a double-digit majority to the party of Hakeem Jeffries.
GOP rules do not require the election of leadership until January. So, the unseemly haste to re-anoint the failed leadership of the past was outrageous. Mollie Hemingway, Wyoming native and editor-in-chief of The Federalist, told Fox News that this move “really showed contempt for the voters.”
Nowhere is the contempt more obvious than in the realm of election integrity. Over 85% of Republicans want the SAVE America Act passed. But establishment Republicans despise their own constituency.
And it’s not only in Washington. Wyoming’s own Senate leadership created their own Pizzagate last March when they deliberately frittered away critical hours making sure that HB 84 - Falsifying election documents and HB 52- Elections-hand counting for recounts never got a vote.
HB 84 would have made a county clerk’s deliberate falsifying of a post-election audit illegal. While HB 52 would have provided the only meaningful way of making certain that machine counts matched the actual ballots cast.
These bills sailed through the people’s House with votes of 61-0 and 49-9, respectively. Obviously, they would have passed the Senate with similar margins. But our leadership deliberately 86ed them. Now, that same leadership is running unopposed for Senate president.
Ever since the 2020 debacle, Wyoming citizens have been demanding meaningful election audits. The Kabuki theater of “risk limiting audits” and “air gaps” are no longer persuasive—if they ever were.
This is especially so since the Weston County Clerk would have gotten clean away with a fraudulent result and with the falsifying of a post-election audit in 2024 had it not been for a hand re-count of the paper ballots. And that hand count was very nearly blocked by the County Clerks’ Association.
Moreover, I am still scratching my head to figure out how the Uinta County Clerk could fail to count 174 votes out of 286—a 61% failure rate that left a duly elected committeeman entirely out of her statutory election report—without any accountability. She has neither explained how that “human error” happened nor how she would prevent it in the future.
Now, ten days after our 2026 midterms, some Americans are analyzing the votes to determine why the electorate turned on Republicans. But a great many Americans are looking at the same numbers and wondering whether it was the electorate that turned on Republicans or an algorithm that overrode the electorate.
Those are two wildly different questions.
After the 2020 election, anyone who questioned whether our elections were “open, free and equal,” as Wyoming’s Constitution (Art. 1, Sec. 27) requires, were throttled by social media, subjected to vicious lawfare, and otherwise pressured to shut up.
That did nothing to quell their concerns. It only made them more skeptical.
In normal social discourse, when someone voices doubt, people who scream and bloviate about their honesty only increase the doubt. But people who calmly answer with evidence and transparency build trust.
That’s because honest people are not interested in winning the argument but in determining the truth. Divisions between people are not settled by power-plays but by mutual submission to the truth.
The same applies to institutions. All the screaming and histrionics that claim our elections to be as pure as the wind-driven snow are only bloviations that further divide our citizenry. Anyone seriously interested in uniting a divided electorate around the truth knows what to do.
Whether you believe our voter registries are clean and our counts are unaffected by algorithms or not, the rational answer remains the same. “Show me the money.” Do the due diligence of hand-counting paper ballots in open transparency. Pass HB 52 and watch division dissolve.
Wyoming is perfectly positioned to lead the way. No state in the union has a citizenry that has more power with politicians than Wyoming. I defy you to show me another state where the Secretary of State gives out his personal cell phone number in public speeches. I defy you to show me another state where any citizen has such open access to county clerks, county commissioners, and state legislators.
Wyoming can lead America out of its voting skepticism by leveraging this citizen access to demand an end to Kabuki theater and a return of hand-count audits.
You do not have to be convinced that it will reveal any anomalies. All you need be convinced of is that it will end fruitless arguments. That should be enough incentive to lead America to a better place.
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
