The Sovereign Ballot: Why Wyoming's Elections Expose a National Security Crisis

OPINION

Abraham Lincoln warned that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. In a constitutional republic, public trust is not blind faith; it is an obligation of proof. When officials ask Americans to accept election outcomes on mere assertion, they invert self-government. Trust follows verified facts, not reassurance.

As investigative author Mollie Hemingway documented in Rigged, the erosion of American elections is structural. It occurs when statutory safeguards are discarded, private interests capture public administration, and transparency yields to corporate opacity. Wyoming's failures are not an isolated embarrassment. They are a national warning. If the most reliably conservative state in the republic cannot demonstrate compliance with its own election laws, Americans must ask what occurs in California, New York, Pennsylvania, and other states where oversight is weaker and political pressure is greater.

Wyoming is ground zero in a contest for national dominance. Beneath our soil lie oil, gas, coal, and uranium powering the republic. In our hills lie rare earth minerals, including neodymium and praseodymium, essential for advanced defense systems and breaking dependence on hostile supply chains in Communist China. Dark money networks understand this. Across Western states, outside coalitions have poured fortunes into elections to defeat conservative leaders who champion domestic energy and national security infrastructure. When outside forces spend millions to reshape Western governance, no one should assume they will stop at campaign advertisements while leaving vote tabulation unexamined.

When concerned citizens retained me as legal counsel to examine Wyoming's voting apparatus, I began as a skeptic. But statutory text placed alongside official records forces sentiment to surrender to evidence. What emerged is a sobering record of statutory disregard and unverified systems that persist today.

Wyoming Statute Section 22-11-104(b)(iii) requires mandatory pre-election Logic and Accuracy, or L&A, testing of electronic tabulators at least two weeks before each election. Testing must cover every ballot category: every precinct style, accessible ballot-marking devices for disabled voters, and early absentee ballots. Before polls opened on August 18, 2026, the Secretary of State reported 18.47 percent of registered Wyoming voters had already voted early or absentee. Testing only election-day ballots while ignoring early voting equipment leaves verification fatally incomplete.

The statute commands that during the test, a different number of valid votes shall be assigned to each candidate for an office, and for and against each measure. Words in a statute are binding commands. If software silently shifts votes from Candidate A to Candidate B, the only way testing catches that flaw is by assigning each candidate a different number of test votes. If Candidate A receives five and Candidate B receives three, a sound machine reports five and three. But if both receive five and the machine reports five and five, nothing is proven. Identical numbers make the test blind to the very errors it exists to catch.

In 2024, Secretary of State Chuck Gray formally warned that assigning different vote totals is unambiguously required and not a formality, confirming statewide testing failures. No court has since verified those failures were corrected. Public records from August 2026 primary prove these identical violations persist.

This matters most in the primary. In deeply Republican Wyoming, the primary determines the officeholder. Any actor seeking to influence state governance would concentrate resources there, where outcomes are settled. The 2026 primary was conducted on machines whose pre-election verification remains legally deficient.

Weston County illustrates the breakdown. Testing repeatedly failed to assign different numbers, yet the county certified the machines had passed. A post-election audit claiming zero discrepancies collapsed when audits revealed twenty-one errors across seventy-five ballots, culminating in criminal charges, a guilty plea, and the clerk's resignation in April 2026. In Campbell County's 2026 primary, official logs noted only one ballot style tested, yet the clerk certified readiness. In Fremont County's 2026 primary, test tables revealed thirty-two unexplained undervotes in a single party race, yet readiness was certified. Similar deviations were documented in Laramie, Natrona, and Sheridan counties.

This failure is compounded by corporate secrecy and documented hardware vulnerability. Wyoming relies on tabulators from Election Systems and Software, known as ES&S. Machines equipped with internet-capable modems were mistakenly ordered in March 2020 and the order allegedly stopped. Because an interim Secretary of State signed a contract prohibiting officials from opening or inspecting internal machine components, the state has no independent way to verify that modems were in fact removed from machines currently counting Wyoming votes.

Wyoming law requires every electronic voting system to be air-gapped, meaning physically isolated from the internet and from any network connection whatsoever. In practice, that requirement is undermined by the administration process itself. County election management computers running ES&S's Electionware software are standard networked machines, not air-gapped workstations. ES&S's own technical documentation confirms that election definition files are transferred from those computers to USB thumb drives, then duplicated using commercial SYSTOR cloning devices. Independent technical reviewer and voting security expert Rick Weible identified that thumb-drive and duplicator process as a documented malware pathway into election equipment. Interviews with technical reviewers further confirm that clerks access ES&S systems from internet-connected county computers to obtain those files, consistent with ES&S's own documented system architecture. Those same interviews report that Wyoming voting systems have not received antivirus or Windows security updates since 2022. In a 2020 congressional hearing, lawmakers raised formal concerns that components were sourced from manufacturers in China and Russia and that remote access capabilities posed severe national security risks. The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) designated election infrastructure as critical national infrastructure in 2017, affirming that election security is national security.

We have traded the transparent ballot box for an inscrutable electronic labyrinth. This is the first of a three-part series examining the public record, administrative breakdown, and the path forward. An honest public servant has nothing to fear from sunlight; concealment breed’s distrust. The sovereign remedy is simple and constitutionally sound: hand-marked paper ballots, publicly counted on election night by bipartisan citizen teams in every precinct, where every free citizen can see the truth with their own eyes.