Wyoming Lawmakers Push Seven Election Shake-ups to the 2025 Session

Wyoming Public Media and the Sheridan Press contributed to this report.

Wyoming’s latest bid to “tighten up” elections isn’t going anywhere. On Monday, the Legislature’s Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee voted to send seven overhaul bills to February’s budget session — despite repeated reminders from clerks and some lawmakers that the state’s elections are already reliable. (Wyoming backed Donald Trump by a bigger margin than any other state in 2024.)

If the package survives, it would make recounts more common and more manual, curb ballot collection by third parties, raise the signature bar for independents to reach the general ballot, expand random hand-count audits, and narrow what counts as acceptable voter ID by dropping student IDs and non-photo documents. The drafts also touch poll-watcher access and tighten testing rules for voting machines. In bill-speak, that’s 26LSO-0042 through 0048, covering ballot harvesting, hand-count audits and recounts, poll-watching rules, independent-candidate thresholds, voting system tests, and revised voter ID.

Not everyone’s sold. Sen. Bill Landen of Casper said he’s hearing the ID changes could make it harder for his 87-year-old mother to vote:

“What exactly are we doing here?”

Supporters such as Freedom Caucus member Rep. Steve Johnson countered that “purity of elections” is written into the state constitution and say the bills are about shoring up trust in case bad actors try to manipulate results.

Critics argue the opposite — that the constant drumbeat about “integrity” is what’s eroding confidence. Sheridan civics advocate and former candidate Gail Symons called the push for more hand counts a step backward, pointing to research that shows they’re less accurate, slower, pricier and a logistical mess at scale. She said the broader package leans on “assumption” and debunked theories rather than evidence. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Chuck Gray frames the effort as preventing fraud, even though a Wyoming Public Radio review found only about 7.5% of formal complaints to his office since January 2023 alleged fraud.

The committee advanced all seven measures — and three earlier election bills — for the Feb. 9 start. Because it’s a budget session, anything that isn’t the biennium budget (or a possible redistricting bill) needs a two-thirds vote just to be introduced.

After elections, the panel turned to reapportionment. A subcommittee reported there’s still no clean way to square Wyoming’s constitutional preference for giving each county a House member and a senator with federal “one person, one vote” requirements. A 1991 court ruling forced today’s multi-county districts, and the report bluntly says any plan deviating more than 10% in population is “extremely unlikely” to survive a federal challenge. Translation: there’s no magic map that satisfies both constitutions right now. Lawmakers asked the Management Council to keep studying options in 2026 in case Congress — or a fresh idea — opens a path.