CHEYENNE—With sparse lawmaker discussion, no changes and little engagement with public commenters, a House panel stacked with Freedom Caucus members advanced Wednesday stricter requirements for voter registration in Wyoming.
Representatives on the House Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee, which handles election law, easily passed two measures pushed by Secretary of State Chuck Gray to establish a 30-day residency requirement for voting in Wyoming and require proof of that residency and U.S. citizenship when registering to vote here.
Keeping people who aren’t U.S. citizens or Wyoming residents from voting is a top priority of the Freedom Caucus — and conservatives nationwide — who have painted the issue in stark terms and made it a major platform plank despite little evidence of any significant issue with voter fraud in the state.
If Wednesday’s meeting was an indicator for how the caucus intends to treat the voter registration bills, they are not likely to face significant challenges until they proceed to the Wyoming Senate and that chamber’s equivalent committee. House lawmakers Wednesday kept their questions for Gray to those that bolstered the argument that more election security was needed. The only suggested amendment came from the committee’s lone Democrat and was swiftly rejected.
Former Sublette County Clerk Mary Lankford, who represents the County Clerks Association of Wyoming, on Wednesday said her organization had polled the state’s 23 county election clerks. The clerks reported a combined five non-citizens who had tried to vote in 2024’s general election. All were turned away.
Another six people who had been flagged as potential non-citizens did vote in the election. Lankford said those people were asked to verify their citizenship, and based on the clerk’s past experience, had likely been flagged in error and would be able to prove their eligibility to vote.
Lankford said the clerks would be able to implement the bill requiring proof of citizenship at registration, but she described it as potentially duplicative because around 90% of new voters today bring their drivers licenses to vote. Clerks already run those new registrations through a database checked by the U.S. Department of Homeless Security for proper citizenship.
Gray told lawmakers he did not believe that database was a sufficient guardrail for ensuring votes were citizens. “Proof of citizenship on the front end is very, very, very, very different,” he said.
Lankford and others skeptical of the drive to add more rules to voting say they worry the legislation could create hurdles, whether intentional or not, to valid Wyoming residents who may not bring the proper paperwork when visiting their county clerk’s office or polling place.
The first bill, House Bill 156, “Proof of voter residency-registration qualifications”, would leave it up to Gray’s office to decide what documents will qualify as proof of residence. It does not appear to require a prospective registrant to prove they have lived in the state for a full 30 days, but they must swear to such on their registration form, where lying would be a crime.
The second bill, House Bill 157, “Proof of voter citizenship”, provides a list of documents to prove citizenship, ranging from a Wyoming driver’s license to a membership card for a federally recognized tribe to a birth certificate or certificate of naturalization.
Gray on Wednesday cited the case of a non-citizen being caught voting in Wyoming to justify his cause. A Campbell County resident registered as a Republican and voted in the 2020 election. He was later charged by the federal government with passport fraud, and a federal agent informed state authorities in August 2023 that the man, a Mexican national, had obtained a false Wyoming driver’s license and registered to vote.
Gray asked the Campbell County clerk to remove the man from the voter rolls that same month, and the clerk did so. Gray told that story in his testimony on the first bill.
Rep. Gary Brown, a Cheyenne Republican and Freedom Caucus member, urged Gray to recount the incident again less than an hour later, during the secretary of state’s testimony on the second bill.
“I just wanted to get this as a matter of record, so would you speak on that again,” Brown said. Gray did so, and he added that without “verification measures, you don’t know how many times this is happening that you don’t catch.”
But opponents of the drive to require more identification for voting say that single example isn’t much of an inspiration.
“Mentioning one case in the past several years where a non-citizen was caught voting, I don’t know that that justifies sort of a draconian approach,” Marguerite Herman, a lobbyist for the League of Woman Voters, said in testimony.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that tracks cases of voter fraud, has identified four convictions for voter fraud in Wyoming in the last 40 years.
Despite such low numbers, caucus leadership promised ahead of this session that they would quickly move to pass Gray’s election security measures, including them in the Freedom Caucus’s “Five and Dime” plan of legislative priorities to tackle within the session’s first 10 days. Wednesday, the second day of the 2025 general session and the first day of committee meetings, saw caucus members doing just that across several meetings.
Eight members of the nine person House Corporations Committee are aligned with the Freedom Caucus. Only Rep. Mike Yin, D-Jackson, voted against either of the bills. Yin was also the only lawmaker to offer an amendment — seeking to tweak the state residency bill so that it would also exclude people who do not reside more than half the year in Wyoming from voting.
His Republican colleagues wordlessly let the amendment die without anyone offering a second.
“I think people think I have ulterior motives,” Yin told WyoFile. “I just want our policies to make sense and not be arbitrary.”
The post Stricter voter registration rules speed through Freedom Caucus-packed panels appeared first on WyoFile .