As the Trump administration and Wyoming’s top election official push for election integrity reforms, few formal complaints filed in the state contain allegations of voter fraud, according to documents Wyoming Public Radio received through an open records request.
Nearly half of the complaints sent to the secretary of state’s office in the past two years focused on misconduct or wrongdoing by election officials, whereas just 7.5% alleged voter fraud, a big focus of Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray.
“ When you get down to whether there was outright fraud and voter cheating or some or organized cheating, this kind of fits, that that is not happening,” Sen. Cale Case (R-Lander), co-chair of the Joint Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee, said about this story’s findings. “Our elections and their conduct have a high level of integrity.”
A glimpse into Wyomingites’ election concerns
In general, Wyomingites who believe there’s been a violation of the state’s election laws can file a complaint to the secretary of state’s office.
WPR filed an open records request to Gray’s office in late July asking for “formal complaints filed between 1/3/2023 and 7/24/2025 through the Secretary’s office related to election errors committed by government officials and potential voter fraud.”
The request also asked for complaints related to “violations of statute surrounding political campaigns, including those having to do with campaign mailers.”
Out of 80 formal election complaints submitted in response to that request, WPR estimates 42.5% were about mistakes or wrongdoing by officials, 17.5% were about improper campaigning, 16.3% were about campaign mailers, 7.5% about potential voter fraud, 7.5% about political action committees or interest groups, and 2.5% about unqualified candidates. Just under 4% of complaints didn’t fall into any of these categories.
Additionally, four of the election complaints described errors in Weston County. Those complaints over incorrect ballots being given to voters and leading to a miscount in three races spurred investigations by Secretary Gray, who recommended Weston County Clerk Becky Hadlock's removal, two investigations by the governor’s office and a suite of draft legislation aimed at preventing the issue from happening again.
At least six complaints were submitted by future, current or former state lawmakers.
An attorney with Gray’s staff did not answer an emailed question inquiring which of the 80 complaints WPR reviewed, if any, were passed along to the state attorney general’s office for investigation and possible prosecution. County clerks addressed some.
Two of the complaints WPR received were unsigned, and a few were submitted more than once, were undated or appeared to be outside the date range specified in the request.
Voter fraud complaints: The details
Of the 80 complaints WPR received in its records request, six alleged voter fraud.
One voter fraud complaint alleged that in 2022, absentee ballots were sent out to the wrong addresses in Albany County and that those ballots were then cast.
Another complaint made by the same person claimed in 2022, a man dropped off a package with an election judge in Laramie at a polling site after it closed. That same complainant also mentioned concerns about student voters getting bused up from Colorado to Wyoming for the election in 2020, claiming the student “voters were not being asked to present a proper form of Identification to register to vote inside the poll location.”
One mentions a Mexican national who, according to a state Department of Transportation official, “fraudulently obtained a WY driver license and registered to Vote in WY” in Campbell County. This was the only complaint WPR received that alleged a noncitizen was potentially registering to vote. That individual was later indicted for passport fraud and pleaded guilty in federal court.
Another complaint involved a convicted felon allegedly attempting to register to vote in Crook County, despite not having had his voting rights restored.
Two of the six were essentially the same complaint and were filed by the same person. They alleged a Shoshoni town councilman voted “in the wrong precinct in the 2022 election” as a “nonqualified elector.”
In its analysis of the complaints, WPR defined voter fraud as instances of felons who haven’t had their voting rights restored, registered voters who cast the wrong ballot, or noncitizens voting illegally in Wyoming, intentionally or otherwise.
Complaints about potential fraud committed by elected officials were not included in the “voter fraud” category. Instead, those complaints were filed under the “mistakes or wrongdoing by officials” category. If the definition of voter fraud had been widened to include alleged fraud by officials, the number of voter fraud complaints WPR identified would grow from six to eight. One concerned allegations about ballot harvesting in Albany County, while the other detailed an election judge who allegedly withheld voter registrations until after a general election in Sheridan County.
The small number of formal voter fraud complaints comes as Gray continues to back a series of bills that aim to improve election integrity in the state, despite some officials’ insistence that voter fraud is not widespread and Wyoming’s elections are secure. Critics of some of those measures have said these reforms will make it harder for qualified electors to vote.
Gray, along with the further-right Wyoming Freedom Caucus, has made reshaping the way the state runs its elections a key part of his legislative agenda.
In the last general session, Gray defended bills, like one that would've required proof of citizenship to register to vote, by testifying to the House Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions Committee on Jan. 15 that “when you don't have these verification measures, you don't know how many times it is happening that you don't catch.”
In response to questions about WPR’s reporting, including a question about critics who might say the low number of voter fraud complaints indicates the issue isn’t top of mind for Wyomingites, Gray said WPR’s reporting is “misleading” without specifying how. He also said, “I'm going to continue to advance the common-sense election integrity reforms that the people of Wyoming want. Our office takes all election complaints very seriously. This is why we have taken proactive steps to partner with the Trump Administration to remove non-citizens from our voter rolls and refer them for prosecution.”
Recently, Gray’s office said it identified three active voter records that matched people flagged by the U.S. Department of Citizenship and Immigration Services as noncitizens. His office referred the three to county clerks in Carbon, Lincoln and Teton counties for potential removal from voter lists, and to those counties’ attorneys for further investigation of “potential false voting.”
Gray did not respond to WPR’s other emailed questions asking about the fact that the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, lists only four documented cases of voter fraud since 1982, or that in a National Public Affairs poll of 497 likely general election voters in Wyoming conducted for the state Freedom Caucus ahead of the November election, 10% of respondents listed “Ensuring election integrity” as their top issue.
Caveats
It’s possible some complaints involving voter fraud allegations may have been received by county-level officials, not the secretary of state’s office, and therefore were not included in this analysis.
Generally speaking, complaints involving statewide candidates or groups are supposed to be submitted to the secretary, whereas complaints involving local candidates or groups are usually sent to county clerks in the county where the incident took place.
Because of that, some complaints involving voter fraud that don’t involve statewide advocacy groups, political action committees or candidates may not have been represented in the 80 complaints reviewed by WPR.
That said, Sen. Case told WPR that in practice, county clerks and the secretary of state “have kind of overlapping jurisdiction” to look into and receive complaints, and that complaints about local officials that are technically supposed to be filed with county clerks can be filed with Gray’s office instead.
“ The secretary of state really does have statewide jurisdiction, so if it's alleging a violation of the law, he's certainly within his wheelhouse to look into it,” said Case.
Indeed, according to the complaints WPR reviewed, some that were sent to Gray appear to involve only local officials or candidates.
Besides the secretary of state and county clerks, election complaints about voter fraud can also be disclosed to law enforcement officials such as the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Wyoming or the U.S. Department of Justice, depending on the circumstances.
Similarly, complaints made through informal channels, like text messages or emails sent directly to the secretary or his office or comments made during Microsoft Teams calls, were not included in WPR’s records request.
Gray’s point of contact for public records requests, Joe Rubino, did not answer follow-up questions about an undated complaint, the origin of some of the unsigned complaints or the total number of complaints Gray’s office has received during his tenure, citing a provision of the state’s Public Records Act that says, “A governmental entity shall not be required to compile data, extract data or create a new document to comply with an electronic record request.”
Room for improvement
Election complaints constitute unverified allegations about interest groups or state residents who are perceived to have violated the state’s Election Code, known as Title 22.
But even unproven, they can still serve as a useful metric to determine what voters are concerned about when it comes to Wyoming elections, said Ryan Williamson, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Wyoming (UW) who specializes in election administration.
“Six [election fraud complaints] in the tally kind of comports with what we saw in the Wyoming election year survey last year, where most people feel pretty good about elections in Wyoming,” said Williamson. “So I think it's just corroborating a really important aspect of [how] elections in Wyoming seem to be going pretty well.”
Last year’s election year survey by UW’s Wyoming Survey and Analysis Center asked respondents how reliable they thought vote counts would be in Wyoming. Over 88% said either “very” or “somewhat” reliable.
Despite how infrequent documented cases of voter fraud are, when it does happen, Williamson said it’s often unintentional.
“A lot of times when [voter fraud] happens, it's also not even intentional,” he said. “Perhaps it's someone who did not know that they had their voting rights removed or thought that they had them restored when they hadn't, or maybe didn't realize they were somehow in the wrong jurisdiction.”
Case said that the categories with the largest shares of complaints, like campaign mailers and improper campaigning, tell him that Wyomingites are dissatisfied with some elements of modern state politics.
“ This all sort of fits with my thinking,” he said. “I think people don't like the way Wyoming elections have evolved. They're much nastier, the anonymous mailers, the lack of facts in mailers and allegations all contribute to that. That’s a serious detriment to our elections. That's really hard to get our hands around, especially things like undirected expenditures from third parties that can participate in elections and not have to reveal much.”
Lawmakers on Case’s committee have been considering a series of election integrity bills during the interim, many of which died in the last legislative general session. That includes one bill that would expand the use of hand count audits of ballots. The committee will consider seven other draft bills at its Nov. 3 meeting in Cheyenne.
This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, supporting state government coverage in the state. Wyoming Public Media and Jackson Hole Community Radio are partnering to cover state issues both on air and online.
