Even as Wyoming stands on the verge of electing someone who questions the integrity of the state’s elections process to lead it, we think it’s time to shift the conversation.

After all, here in the Equality State, former President Donald Trump easily won our three electoral votes by the widest margin of victory in the country. He received more than 68% of the votes cast in 2016, and nearly 70% in 2020.

So how is it possible that state Rep. Chuck Gray, R-Casper, and others still question the integrity of Wyoming’s elections process? If stuffing the absentee ballot drop boxes was a legitimate concern here, wouldn’t Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden have made more of a dent in those numbers?

And why are some residents wasting the time of staff at the Laramie County Clerk’s Office by asking for voter rolls that contain private information and clearly aren’t public records?

Of course, those are rhetorical questions, because we already know the answer: certain media talking heads continue to stir the pot called “The Big Lie,” and many Americans – including many in Wyoming – continue to believe it, despite all evidence to the contrary.

But we have to wonder whether Mr. Gray and some of his fellow elected officials question the legitimacy of their own victories. Do they believe the process is so corrupt at this point that none of the results can be trusted?

Of course not. If they or the people they support win, the election was fair. If they lose, there must be something wrong with the process, right? It can’t be because the majority of voters had grown tired of their political posturing and were seeking someone who might actually get something done that would make their lives better.

The question we have to answer in 2022 is how much longer we want to live in the past. Are we going to continue to let the 2020 election divide us to the point of complete stagnation or, worse yet, our democracy collapses entirely?

We think it’s time to move on, and we’re pretty sure most Wyoming residents feel the same way. So, let’s turn our attention to addressing a bigger concern related to our elections, and that’s voter participation. It’s true that last month’s primary saw more than 63% of the state’s 287,014 registered voters cast ballots. The related good news is that voter registration is the highest it’s ever been.

Yet, we still have a long way to go in order to be satisfied. According to the Wyoming Election Division of the Secretary of State’s Office, the state’s voting age population this year is 446,379, which means the turnout among that group was 40.8% for this year’s primary. That’s higher than it’s been since 1994, but we don’t think anyone should be happy with significantly less than half of those eligible to vote deciding who should represent all of us.

The percentages do increase when we shift our attention to November. In 2020, 62.6% of the voting age population cast ballots. Still, just 60% of those old enough to vote were registered to do so. Only two years – 2012 and 2016 – saw a lower percentage signed up to participate.

Which is why we support some fundamental changes to our election process that – unlike the unnecessary meddling proposed by Rep. Gray – might actually encourage more people to make their voices heard at the polls.

The first is an open primary. As Wyoming residents clearly showed on Aug. 16, they are willing to cross party lines to vote for a particular candidate. With the hotly contested U.S. House race between incumbent Liz Cheney and challenger Harriet Hageman on the Republican ballot, 172,047 of the 182,232 who cast ballots – 94.4% – voted GOP. Only 8,201 cast a Democratic Party ballot (4.5%), while 1,984 (less than 1.1%) voted nonpartisan, which means many Democrats changed their party affiliation to vote for Ms. Cheney.

In an open primary, this would have been unnecessary. According to the nonpartisan group FairVote, in an open primary, “voters of any affiliation may vote in the primary of any party. ... In many open primary states, voters do not indicate partisan affiliation when they register to vote.”

This possibility was discussed briefly at an Aug. 25 meeting of the Wyoming Legislature’s Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee in Casper. Also on the agenda that day was ranked-choice voting.

Again, according to FairVote: “RCV ... allows voters the option to rank candidates in order of preference: one, two, three, and so forth. If your vote cannot help your top choice win, your vote counts for your next choice.

“If a candidate receives more than half of the first choices in races where voters elect one winner, that candidate wins, just like in a single-choice election. However, if there is no majority winner after counting first choices, the race is decided by an ‘instant runoff.’ The candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and voters who picked that candidate as ‘Number 1’ will have their votes count for their next choice. This process continues until there’s a majority winner or a candidate won with more than half of the vote.”

On the surface, this system seems more complex and harder to understand, but it actually means your vote counts even more than it does currently (which is quite a lot in a state as sparsely populated as Wyoming).

Other things that could be done to increase voter participation include:

Implementing automatic voter registration, either based on birthdate or when someone obtains a driver’s license;

Allowing online voter registration, along with a verification process;

Making more absentee ballot drop boxes available, not fewer;

Making Election Day a national holiday or moving it to Saturday; and

Strengthening civic education in public schools.

We all know there’s no single way to get more people to vote. But if those who say they’re concerned about election integrity are really interested in making sure qualified residents cast ballots, it’s time for them to prove it by supporting some of the recommendations above.

WE WANT TO KNOW WHAT YOU THINK : Contact us via email at opinion@wyomingnews.com.

WE WANT TO KNOW WHAT YOU THINK: Contact us via email at opinion@wyomingnews.com.

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