Legislature to revisit ranked choice, crossover voting measures 

CASPER — In the upcoming legislative session, state lawmakers will again take up a slate of bills that aim to reform Wyoming’s elections and campaigns. 

Some of the bills will be reruns of legislation that popped up in the past. Others, like one that would hone regulations around federal PACs, have come about as the result of new information that emerged in this year’s midterm elections. 

Another would put into state statute security measures around election equipment that Wyoming already undertakes voluntarily. 

Lawmakers on the corporations committee opted in October to table a sweeping election reform bill that would have put in place open primary and ranked choice general elections. 

Given the time needed to switch over to a new voting system, the move all but shut down the possibility for major election reform before the 2024 presidential election. 

But the committee did move along another bill that could give Wyoming a taste of what ranked choice (also known as instant runoff) elections could be like. 

If signed into law, the bill would create a ranked choice voting pilot program for nonpartisan municipal races. Municipalities don’t have to join the pilot, but could opt into the program if they want to. 

The idea comes from Wyoming’s neighbor Utah, which passed a bill in 2018 to create a ranked choice voting pilot program for municipalities. Now, more than 20 cities in the state use the ranked choice system. 

Proponents of the pilot say it could lessen what Matthew Germer, a researcher at the nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research organization R Street Institute, called “strategic voting,” when people vote for candidates that aren’t their first choice because their preferred candidate is unlikely to win. 

Some people also think ranked choice voting could build more consensus among voters. 

But those against the bill argue that ranked choice voting is complicated, though feedback from voters in Utah show that most of them who used the system found it to be pretty straightforward. 

And though this particular bill would only impact nonpartisan races, some worry the pilot could open the door for ranked choice voting to be used in partisan competitions as well. 

That could potentially loosen the Wyoming Republican Party’s grip over elections in the state, giving more of a chance to Democrats and third-party candidates, an outcome that proponents of the bill see as a positive and opponents see as a negative. 

Beginning in the early 2000s, the Wyoming Secretary of State’s office started collecting and giving out voter history and absentee ballot requests and returns information on registry lists. 

Only specific people and groups can get those registry lists: Wyoming candidates for political office, campaign committees, party central committee officers, political action committee officers, elected officials, people promoting or opposing a state ballot measure and organizations promoting voter participation. 

The absentee ballot information helped candidates run efficient campaigns; they could send campaign mailers to voters with absentee ballots and stop sending mailers once voters had cast their ballot. 

But then the Secretary of State’s office was flooded with records requests following the 2020 presidential election, and that bombardment led the Secretary of State’s and Attorney General’s offices to reevaluate what information could be given out on the registry list under Wyoming’s election code. 

Monique Meese, an attorney and former communications and policy director of the Secretary of State’s office, explained before the corporations committee in August that after the reevaluation, the offices concluded that voter history and absentee returns and requests information shouldn’t be given out on those registry lists. 

Now, anyone who wants that data has to go through county clerks or ask for it as a public records request. That change happened in May, some months before this year’s midterm elections. 

Some candidates who had previously relied on having ready access to absentee information found the change to be a challenge. 

In October, the corporations committee moved along House Bill 5, which would explicitly allow, under state statute, absentee request and return information, as well as voter ID numbers, to be information included on the registry list. 

So basically, it would let the Secretary of State’s office give out some of the voter information that it had previously provided before the reevaluation. 

Another proposed piece of legislation, House Bill 6, is kind of paired with the former bill. It would ensure that cast ballots, cast ballot images, cast vote records and other data that comes from the cast ballots of individual voters stay confidential.