Get ready for fireworks at next Friday’s Corporations committee meeting

Joint Corporations Committee, 2021 (Photo credit: Nick Reynolds)

Next Friday’s meeting of the Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions committee in Cheyenne is slated to take up a number of controversial bill drafts relating to Wyoming elections. Log on at 8:30am and break out the popcorn.

The day starts tamely enough with a continued discussion LSO-132 Political Expenditures. It proposes a federal constitutional amendment to restrict the flow of dark money in political campaigns. 

The remainder of the morning is devoted to the Secretary of State’s office presenting an “election fraud investigation” of the Coal Country Conservatives (CCC). This PAC, with a budget of $1,800, registered with the FEC. But the Campbell county clerk wanted them investigated for not also registering with the SOS office. Wyoming Statute is explicit that “federal political action committees shall not be required to file [with the SOS if] the committee is required to comply with federal election law reporting requirements” (Wyo. Stat. 22-25-106(g)).

The CCC PAC’s $1,800 is dwarfed by the Western Conservatives PAC’s $355,133 spent to unseat conservatives. It seems small potatoes, and a strange use of two-and-a-half hours of the committee’s time. On the upside, it is heartening to know that some people can allege “election fraud” without being labeled as “election deniers.” 

After the lunch break, the bill draft, LSO-191 Municipal nonpartisan ranked-choice elections, will be discussed. This proposes to bring Utah’s ranked-choice voting (RCV) to Wyoming. Cities can deny any political party the right to run municipal officers of their own choosing. Rather, RCV imposes a uni-party scheme that transfers the votes of the loser to a second-choice candidate and counts the ballots again.

LSO-192 Election revisions, will be the next bill draft considered. It would prohibit political parties from fielding a candidate of their own choosing for statewide or federal office. Instead, RCV would be used to select four candidates—regardless of party—for listing on the November ballot. RCV is currently bluing states like California, Delaware, Colorado, Oregon, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Alaska.

Both RCV bills neuter political parties. Such a deliberate kneecapping of party relevance begs the question of why we have them in the first place. We will discuss this in a future column.

Next up is LSO-190 Voter registry list. It would stipulate that, when asked, county clerks must provide voter registry lists with voter I.D. numbers and absentee ballot data. This is a good thing.

The bill was necessitated by a unilateral change in policy on the part of the SOS office. Prior to 2022, candidates and interested citizens routinely requested and received this information. But this summer the SOS office, without legislative approval, instructed county clerks not to release that information any longer.

LSO-196 Vacancies in elected office is designed to strip political parties of their statutory rights in filling vacancies to elected office. Currently, when a Republican or Democrat resigns from office, the state central committee of that party must give the governor three nominees from which he chooses a replacement. This bill would end that long-standing law. 

LSO-189 Election equipment-federal certification tethers Wyoming election laws to the changing recommendations of the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) and the Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSGs) that are farmed out to the Technical Guidelines Development Committee (TGDC). Thus, Wyoming’s elected and accountable state officials will no longer be answerable to voters for their own competence and judgment. Instead, they will blindly impose whatever new edicts these anonymous and opaque federal bureaucracies might decree in the future.

LSO-271 Specified election records not subject to disclosure would alter state statutes to prevent Wyoming citizens from examining cast ballots, cast ballot images, and cast vote records. In response to dozens of public records requests from citizens, county clerks all over Wyoming have claimed that the constitution prohibits release of these records. The committee obviously thinks this claim is dubious. But rather than instruct the clerks to follow the law, it drafted a bill to put these election records out of reach. So much for transparency. 

For its final act, the committee will take up LSO-186 Wyoming elections commission. This drastically alters Wyoming’s long-standing law by stripping the Secretary of State of his election oversight duties. It is hard to read this bill as anything other than a slap in the face of every primary voter who went to the polls to vote for election reform. 

Rarely do committee meetings promise to be as electric and noteworthy as this one. If you are interested in any of these topics, make your way to the Capitol Extension (W006) next Friday (October 14, 2022). If you cannot be there in person, register beforehand to testify via Zoom. I am sure that the Corporations Committee would love to hear from you.