Wyoming GOP passes resolution to censure Laramie County Clerk
CHEYENNE (WNE) — Saturday morning at its monthly meeting in Douglas, the Wyoming Republican Party’s Central Committee passed a resolution to censure Laramie County Clerk Debra Lee.
Previously, the state GOP’s Executive Committee issued a news release announcing a resolution that criticized Lee’s management of a voting machine test, which it believed to be noncompliant with state law.
The resolution came after the GOP launched a lawsuit against Lee, claiming she unlawfully handled the testing of the voting machines prior to the Aug. 20 primary election.
After the lawsuit was filed, Lee released a public statement claiming there were no errors with the voting test and that the lawsuit sought to disrupt the primary elections process.
The GOP’s issue was that the test ballots all had the same number of votes for each candidate. Per state statute, the test ballots must show a different number of votes on each ballot to demonstrate that the tabulator machines can count a different number of votes for each candidate.
The tabulators were retested and showed no error in counting the votes, Lee previously told the WTE.
Laramie County GOP Chairman Taft Love previously told the WTE the test had gone well, congratulating and thanking the clerk’s office and all who helped ensure a secure election season.
However, the GOP’s censure resolution passed Saturday states that Lee was “misrepresenting that her erroneous testing had no errors, resisting even the most common sense efforts to fix her statutory noncompliance, flatly ignoring multiple early attempts to help her rectify the situation with both the DS450 and DS200 tabulators, failing to perform the public preparation of the voting machines mandated by Wyo. Stat. section 22-10-108, and resisting accountability at every turn.”
The censure resolution is only a formal statement of disapproval. Members of the Wyoming GOP could not be reached for comment before publication Saturday.
This story was published on September 8, 2024.