OPINION
“It is easier to steal when the lights are off.” That needs no footnote. It is a simple truth that nearly 50 years in the law proves true. And it describes exactly what is happening to Wyoming’s elections right now.
Wyoming citizens have the right to vote. What they do not have is the right to check whether their vote was counted honestly. Those are two very different things. The first right is loudly protected. The second has been quietly taken away.
That is not an accident. It is a system — and the system needs to change.
I know this because my clients are your neighbors. They are ordinary Wyoming citizens who started paying attention to what was happening at their local county clerk’s office. They are not conspiracy theorists. They are not political operatives. They are people who read the public record, noticed that something did not add up, and came to an attorney because they could not get straight answers to simple questions. What they found — and what the public record confirms — is a legal trap that makes honest verification nearly impossible.
Here is how the trap works against anyone working to ensure elections are open, free and equal, as guaranteed by Article 1, Section 27 of the Wyoming Constitution, and what I told my clients step by step.
Step 1: You must prove illegal votes or tabulation errors occurred. To challenge an election in Wyoming, you must first prove that something went wrong. Not just suspicious. Not just possible. You must prove errors or illegal votes happened — inside a machine you are not allowed to open, using records you are not allowed to see.
Step 2: You must prove the error was big enough to change the outcome. Even if you prove an error occurred, you are not done. You must prove the error was large enough to flip the result. In a race decided by 300 votes, proving an error changed only 200 votes is not enough and you lose. You must prove at least 300 ballots were altered or miscounted — and you must prove that specific number with evidence you cannot legally obtain.
Step 3: You must do all of this before the deadline runs out. Election contest deadlines are short. Discovery takes months. The clock runs out before you can even ask for the records. The legal system does not wait for the truth to catch up.
Now ask yourself: who designed a system like that? Because in every other area of American law, the rules work the opposite way. If a company hides documents in a lawsuit, the judge tells the jury to assume those documents were damaging. If a defendant refuses to hand over records, the court forces them to comply. The person hiding evidence pays a price. In election law, the person hiding evidence wins.
That brings us to Wyoming’s specific problem.
Imagine a Wyoming citizen who wants to verify our elections. She asks to inspect the test records to verify pre-election testing, and the Cast Vote Records — the electronic logs showing how the machine read and counted each ballot — to check the count. Cast Vote Records contain no names, and any small-precinct identification risk can be handled by grouping or redaction rather than total secrecy. In any honest system, those records would be public. In Wyoming, they are hidden.
Laramie County denied a citizen’s request in April 2022, claiming the records did not exist in physical form and citing ballot secrecy. Four months later, the attorney general issued an opinion, reaching the same result. The justification was voter privacy. But hiding machine math does not protect voters. It protects the machines from being checked.
Attorney Richard Ong reviewed the attorney general’s opinion and found a serious flaw. The Wyoming Constitution provides in Article 6, Section 11: “All voters shall be guaranteed absolute privacy in the preparation of their ballots, and the secrecy of the ballot shall be made compulsory.” Ong points out that the opinion’s key analysis paraphrased this as making secrecy “compulsory,” dropping the words “shall be made.” In his reading, those words direct the Legislature how to regulate the voting booth and do not permanently seal anonymized machine tally records after the election is over. The Constitution protects voters in the voting booth. It does not protect a machine’s arithmetic from public review.
The actual paper ballots are also hidden. The machines cannot be opened. The electronic logs are sealed. Even after the Legislature required posting in 2026, compliance is uneven. Some counties post only “expected” results, others nothing at all. And a summary page does not show whether every ballot style was tested.
Let that sink in. The government is withholding the only three things that could prove whether your vote was counted correctly — the paper ballot, the machine log and the underlying test records — and then telling you that you must prove outcome-determinative error before you can see any of them. That is not a legal standard. That is a cover-up dressed up in legal language.
Elected officials who hide behind this system should be ashamed. They took an oath to serve the public. Hiding the evidence that would prove whether elections are honest is a betrayal of that oath — regardless of whether the elections were honest or not. If the count was right, show us the records. If the machines passed their tests, post the proof. Transparency costs nothing when you have nothing to hide.
Here is what must change if we are to know our elections are open, free and equal. First, when the state fails to conduct lawful testing, the burden must shift. The state must prove the result was right — not the citizen prove it was wrong. Second, Cast Vote Records and ballot images must be public, with redactions where necessary for small precincts. Third, early voting must come with real-time public reconciliation — a running count of ballots received versus voters signed in, posted publicly every day.
Wyoming has approximately 439 precincts and about 336,000 registered voters — fewer than 770 voters per precinct on average. In a typical primary, each precinct sees about 400 ballots. Four neighbors — two from each party — can count 400 paper ballots in under two hours on election night. France counts 60 million voters’ ballots by hand on election night. Wyoming has fewer than 600,000 citizens. This is not hard. It is a choice.
Hand-marked paper ballots, counted in public by citizens at each precinct, fix every problem in this article at once. You cannot hack a hand count. You cannot hide a paper ballot from the neighbors counting it. You cannot run a cover-up in a school gymnasium with 40 people watching.
When the lights are on and the neighbors are watching, thieves find other work. That is not a radical idea. That is self-government.