Senator Bo Biteman (R-SD21) has announced that he has filed two bills addressing election integrity in the Wyoming Senate. The first bill SF-97 “Change in Party Affiliation,” deals with primary election integrity by prohibiting the practice of crossover voting.
Crossover voting involves members of one political party changing their party affiliation (often on the same day of the election) to vote in the competing party’s primary election, then immediately switching back to their original party affiliation.
“This practice has been going on for far too long in our state,” Biteman said. “It is not fair, it is not right, and it is harming the integrity of our party nomination process. This bill will go a long way toward ending this up to now legal, but unethical behavior, and restore confidence in our party nominating process. Party switching cancels out the vote of actual party members by those who wish to game the system and influence the outcome of their competing party’s nominating election.”
Under Biteman’s proposal, voters will be able to change their party affiliation at any time except in the time frame between the candidate filing period which currently takes place in May, until the primary election held in August.
The Senator also filed SF-96 “Collection of Election Ballots-Prohibition” which would prohibit what is commonly known as “Ballot Harvesting.” The proposal would make it illegal for people or groups to solicit, gather or submit absentee ballots without written authorization from the person who requested the absentee ballot.
“This is one common sense step we can take in Wyoming to ensure that our absentee voting process cannot be used to commit voter fraud,” Biteman said. “In Wyoming, we pride ourselves on making it easy to vote through a lengthy early voting and absentee period, this just makes it harder to cheat.”
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Last modified: February 16, 2022