Secretary Gray: Our office is working to advance Election Integrity Agenda for Upcoming 2025 General Session
The upcoming 2025 General Session of the Wyoming State Legislature provides a real opportunity to advance President Trump’s America First, conservative policy reforms that the people of Wyoming want.
As part of this effort and as Wyoming’s Chief Election Official, I’ve committed our administration to continued improvement of Wyoming’s Election statutes, in the upcoming General Session. We have launched an election integrity agenda to ensure that we reach our full potential in advancing these goals. In addition, since our office handles all business registrations, our office proposed a series of bills to the Joint Corporations Committee to stop business fraud and stop foreign adversaries. Those bills were advanced to the upcoming General Session.
Our election integrity plan contains ten planks, but for the purposes of this column, I wanted to focus on three of those key, common-sense election integrity priorities.
First and foremost, only Wyoming citizens should be voting in Wyoming elections. This requires proof of residency and citizenship at the time of registration. Therefore, we are bringing forward amendments to the Election Code clearly creating a process for proof of citizenship and Wyoming residency for registering to vote.
The ongoing Biden/Harris created crisis at the southern border is affecting each and every state, including Wyoming. We must ensure that we safeguard our elections from fraud and guarantee that no vote from an eligible voter is diluted by that of an illegal alien or nonresident who is ineligible to vote.
Our office previously adopted amendments to our Election Procedures that would have required proof of Wyoming residency and prevented illegal immigrants from registering to vote in Wyoming, but these were vetoed by Governor Mark Gordon. These rules were the product of months of collaboration with Wyoming’s 23 county clerks and other stakeholders, and received overwhelming support.
Because of the Governor’s unfortunate veto of our proposed rules, we are now working to advance these proposals through this legislative session.
Our proposal will ensure Wyoming is a leader in election integrity, and fulfill the Constitutional, and statutory, mandate that anyone who registers to vote must be a U.S. citizen and a Wyoming resident.
Last year, President Trump announced that he is working to bring this proposal through the US Congress as well through the SAVE Act, which is an effort that we also support and look forward to continuing to work with Wyoming’s Congressional delegation to advance.
I’m also requesting that the Legislature take immediate action to explicitly ban ballot drop boxes. I remain convinced that the use of unstaffed and unattended ballot drop boxes is not best for our state and lacks statutory authorization. Because of this, and the fact that they jeopardize the chain of custody for ballots, I’m opposed to their use.
While our administration, working with counties, has reduced the number of jurisdictions that used drop boxes in the 2024 election, it is necessary to take action to ban them in state law.
Finally, I’m proposing a bill to strengthen our Voter ID requirements. As a former member of the Wyoming Legislature, one of my proudest accomplishments was the work we did to pass voter ID in 2021.
This election, we continued to implement Voter ID in Wyoming. One of the main election integrity goals voter ID achieves is to stop voter impersonation by ensuring that the person who is receiving a ballot at the polls is in fact the person who they are claiming to be.
We need to continue to strengthen voter ID. It is imperative to require a photo on Voter ID in order to stop voter impersonation. One weakness of the current statute is that there are some loopholes that allow ID’s without photos to be used. We can, and will, continue to make Voter ID stronger, by requiring true, photo ID for voter ID, and by removing all of the ID’s that do not have a photo on them as an option for voter ID. Twenty-four states have this requirement and Wyoming needs to join those states.
While these are three of our key priorities in our election integrity agenda for the 2025 General Session, there are several other reforms we need to pass to strengthen Wyoming’s elections. Some of our other proposals include banning ballot harvesting and ensuring that we have the tools needed to maintain and keep clean voter rolls. The passage of these goals is one of the many priorities our office is working on to advance conservative policy in the upcoming session, and is pivotal to ensuring that Wyoming is a leader nationwide in election integrity.
Chuck Gray was elected Wyoming Secretary of State in 2022. Prior to his election to statewide office, Gray served three terms in the Wyoming House of Representatives.