Secretary of State

Elections, land use top Secretary of State debate

All side with Teton County on land use, only one candidate denounces election fraud claims.

By Sophia Boyd-Fliegel

Three Republicans are running for secretary of state, a position that oversees Wyoming’s elections, campaign finance, business and other registrations.

The secretary of state also has one of five votes on the State Board of Land Commissioners and the State Loan and Investment Board. The secretary of state’s term is four years with no term limits. Annual salary is $125,000 with some benefits.

Despite few documented cases of voter fraud in Wyoming — the Republican think tank the Heritage Foundation has documented only three cases of voter fraud since 2000 — election integrity is voters’ top concern this year for the secretary of state race.

Candidates on elections:

Mark Armstrong is a geologist and engineer from Centennial. Armstrong has not held political office and came in fifth in the 2020 Republican primary for the U.S. Senate with 3.7% of the vote.

Armstrong wants to stop crossover voting and dramatically limit mail-in or absentee voting to people with special circumstances like being in the military, out of town, homebound or a resident in a nursing care facility.

Armstrong takes issue with how his home county of Albany opened absentee ballots. None of his nearly two dozen Freedom of Information Act requests and criminal complaints on the matter submitted to the district attorney and the office for which he’s running were taken seriously, he said.

In 2020, 46% of Wyoming votes were absentee.

Sen. Tara Nethercott is a Cheyenne lawyer and state senator since 2017.

Nethercott is the only candidate running for secretary of state to firmly denounce claims of an illegitimate 2020 presidential election, citing a lack of objective or persuasive evidence of fraud presented to courts with judges from across the political spectrum.

In addition to practicing business, labor and trusts law, Nethercott has served on the secretary of state’s “home committee” — the Legislature’s Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee.

This year Nethercott carried a bill through the Senate that was sponsored by all 23 county clerks that would have allowed them to keep up with absentee votes by beginning to count a few days before the election.

Rep. Chuck Gray began his career as a conservative radio show host and has served in the Legislature as a Casper representative since 2017.

Gray has called the 2020 election a “disaster” and “fraudulent.” He cites the controversial 2022 documentary “2,000 Mules,” directed by a rightwing commentator Dinesh D’Souza, which claims evidence of third parties funding ballot box stuffers or “mules” in swing states, not including Wyoming.

The film has been debunked by all major factchecking outlets and criticized in the media, including Fox News, for relying on a few anonymous sources and improper analysis of cellphone location data.

Gray emphasized his “outsider perspective” compared to Nethercott, though he’s been in the state Legislature for the same length of time. He wants to ban Wyoming’s ballot drop boxes (rolled out in 2020 to keep up with an increase in absentee voting during the COVID-19 pandemic), ban large third-party political donations and preserve voter ID laws, which he helped pass in 2021.

Gray opposed the 2022 bill that Nethercott carried to let county clerks count absentee votes a few days early.

On business and land use oversight:

In a Teton County candidate forum, candidates revealed their differences in election principles and similarities on other potential duties like recording the state’s businesses, keeping watch on “dark money,” and making state land investment decisions.

A recent decision from the State Lands and Investment Board didn’t comply with local Teton County zoning, leading the county to sue the state.

All candidates said they would not have voted to approve 800 storage units and 11 glamping structures near Teton Village and that state land should conform to local zoning.

There could be exceptions to that rule, Nethercott pointed out, if local regulations didn’t permit state lands to benefit state schools. Gray similarly said local rules should be “reasonable” if the state is to follow them.

The generous privacy that Wyoming affords businesses and transactions started a conversation about how much information the secretary of state should request from business filers.

As a member of the Select Committee on Blockchain, Financial Technology and Digital Innovation Technology, Nethercott said the secretary of state office should do more to track the practices of technology businesses.

Gray, like Armstrong, said he had concerns about the so-called “Cowboy Cocktail” and would increase back-end audits, but still wanted small businesses to be able to file for less.

Notably, there’s no evidence that “bad actors” or oligarchs have sheltered money in Wyoming as some media has alleged, Nethercott said. But with the generous privacy that makes Wyoming “business friendly” comes the potential to be taken advantage of. More restrictions, she said, would assuredly make it harder for businesses to file.

Find online candidate forums organized by the League of Women Voters, Teton County Library, KHOL 89.1, Buckrail and the News&Guide at TCLib.org/candidates.

Find YouTube links to watch the full forum at TCLib. org/candidates.