In Wyoming's recent primary, Republican voters didn't get to choose their own candidate. Democrats in the 21st century don't believe in having two-party elections. In California, they try to shut out Republican voters by having a system where the two highest polling candidates win, even if both are Democrat. In Wyoming, they believe they should get to choose their primary candidate and ours – because they will choose more wisely and more "moderately" than Republican voters. They get away with it, because Wyoming was forced by the federal government under Clinton to allow cross-over voting in the primary.

Democrats pretending to be Republican for primary day just chose the next Republican candidate for governor in America's reddest state. Wyoming gave President Trump his biggest victory in the entire presidential election, with sixty-seven percent of the vote. Because the state is so red, the Democrats' choice will definitely win the general election and become the next governor of Wyoming.

A red state like Wyoming has a double problem come election time. Democrat politicians don't have a chance to be elected, so at all levels of local, state, and federal office, they masquerade as Republican candidates, lying to the voters about their true political affiliation.

The double whammy is that Wyoming voting law allows people to register or change their party affiliation at the polling place on voting day and vote in whichever primary they choose. So RINOs are chosen in the Republican primary by Democrat voters pretending for a day to be Republicans. It makes a travesty of the two-party system and cheats Republicans of getting to select their own candidates.

Wyoming is small in population but economically one of our most important states and a key part of President Trump's pro-energy agenda. It is famous and beloved for Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks; it should be equally beloved for its contribution to the nation's economy. Wyoming is surpassed only by giant Texas as an energy powerhouse. Wyoming's Powder River Basin is one of the greatest coal fields in the world. It produces more coal than the next six coal-mining states combined. If Wyoming stopped producing fossil fuels and uranium, 30 states would go dark.

This year, a few days before the hotly contested gubernatorial election, Democrat supporters mounted a campaign called Switch for Wyoming urging their voters to switch their affiliation to Republican in order to push the most liberal GOP candidate for governor over the top. They pulled it off.

Their preferred candidate, Mark Gordon, beat the conservative frontrunner, Foster Friess, by approximately 6-9,000 votes (the official count isn't in yet), well within the margin provided by Democrat voters. Comparing this year's primary to the last two, as many as 13,000 Democrats "disappeared" – many presumably masquerading as Republicans.

At one polling place in Teton County, according to a volunteer checking in voters, all but four registered Democrats asked for Republican ballots.

The Democrat choice for our next Republican governor, Mark Gordon, believes that "global warming is a critical issue for our time." The man who will now be governor of the largest coal-producer in our nation believes in what is euphemistically called alternative energy. While he makes speeches about protecting the coal industry, he makes political donations and even served on the board of groups that fight fossil fuels.

Mark Gordon made political contributions to the DNC, John Kerry, and Democrat candidates for Congress in 2004 and 2006.

In 2012, The Nature Conservancy listed him as a donor in the 10,000-to-99,999-dollar category. In 2018, a Friends of the Earth website (later removed) listed him as a "notable donor, Treasurer of Wyoming." While he has campaigned against federal restrictions on coal, in the recent past he contributed to the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). RMI is working toward a U.S. economy "needing no coal, no oil."

In a state where he beat Hillary Clinton by 46%, President Trump has just been cheated of an ally among the governors, and Wyoming's voters have been cheated of a true conservative candidate. Gordon's win was also used by President Trump's opponents in the media to embarrass him, because on election day, the president tweeted his support for the conservative frontrunner, Foster Friess.

These Democrat primary shenanigans have happened before, and the state legislature does nothing about it, despite the best efforts of the legislature's handful of actual conservatives. That the powers that be want to allow Democrats to select the Republican candidate is extremely frustrating to Republican voters in the state. This year, the Democrat tide almost swept away some beloved conservative incumbents.

Perhaps the answer is simple: business as usual in Wyoming is bloated government and corruption. True conservatives would rein in the overspending that has emptied the state coffers. Wyoming has the highest ratio of government employees to citizens of any state in the nation and the highest ratio of government supervisors to workers and ranks lowest in transparency on financial matters.

Runner-up candidate Foster Friess, a staunch Christian conservative and outspoken supporter of President Trump, is also a businessman who understands finance. No wonder he was the target of the Democrats' crossover scam. Mr. Friess told me his "number-one focus" right now is the scandal that Wyoming has an F ranking by the Center for Public Integrity. That's an F in executive accountability, civil service management, procurement, lobbying disclosure, ethics enforcement, and management of the state pension fund.

"We can wait until the legislature gathers in January to decide the best method of conducting Wyoming's primary elections, however, first we must address the much more important issue and focus all our efforts on that, and that is the disclosure of the entire state's checkbook to the Wyoming citizens. Wyoming is one of only three states that does not make its checkbook available. This will be my number-one focus," said Mr. Friess.

Wyoming's state legislators have a ready excuse to do nothing to protect the integrity of their elections. Crossover voting is actually required in the state, thanks to the strong-arm tactics of the Clinton administration. Wyoming refused to adopt Clinton's 1994 "motor-voter" law, a partisan Democrat initiative to boost registration by under-motivated voting blocs. The law proved to be a disaster that led to widespread corruption of the country's voter rolls – in some cases, 100% of the new voter registrations were fraudulent. Motor-voter raised the cost of keeping election rolls free from fraud to twice the "Election Division's entire annual budget" for some states.

Clinton's attorney general Janet Reno sued three states to force them to comply. Wyoming was given a waiver only by agreeing to same-day registration and allowing primary day "crossover" voting. Both those provisions have been used by Democrats in recent elections to enter the state, register, and vote all on the same day, and to flood the Republican primaries with Democrat voters.

Because it is a deal with the federal government, Wyoming cannot stop same-day registration and cross-over voting unless the state's attorney general is "willing to fight the feds," something the state has been unwilling to do for 16 years under the last two governors, one a Democrat and one a Republican, according to conservative state representative Marti Halverson. Representative Halverson proposed legislation last year to require voter registration to end two weeks before candidates file, but the Legislative Service Office, dominated by progressive bureaucrats, ensured the bill's failure with a "you can't do that" four-page memo.

Unfortunately, voters in a state this red are so complacent that they do not bother to inform themselves. Few bother to vote in the primaries. They simply assume that if someone claims to be Republican, it means he will vote based on conservative principles. The number of actual principled conservatives in the State House is low, indeed. Harriet Hageman, a sterling conservative and clean government advocate who ran a strong campaign to be the Republican candidate for governor, told me, "Our current system, which provides for same-day crossover voting, stifles debate between conservatives and liberals by allowing the Democrats to pick both of the candidates for the general election. While small in number, the Democrats have found a way to exercise an outsized influence in Wyoming. In this case, they did it by branding themselves as 'Independent Republicans of Wyoming,' despite the fact that they are committed and avowed liberals. They are, in other words, willing to use their dark money and distort their affiliation to improperly influence the Republican primary. That is wrong and corrupt."

Idaho had the same problem with crossover voting by Democrats. Fed up Republicans went to court and won.

According to Newsweek:

It wouldn't be the first time Democratic voters had tipped the scales by participating in Republican elections. In 2011, Idaho's Republican Party sued to close its primaries to voters who weren't registered Republicans, citing a study that said as many as 40 percent of Democrats admitted to crossover voting. The judge presiding over the case later estimated that it was likely a much smaller percentage but still ruled in favor of the GOP and closed the primaries to party-affiliated voters only.

Wyoming voters – the few who are paying attention – want this to be the last time Democrats chose who runs on the Republican ticket. They are being cheated of a fair election in which they, not their political opponents, choose their own party's candidate.

In the words of Teton County's Tea Party's letter to its members:

There is clear evidence that the recent Vote Switch-A-Roo is a concerted effort, NOT to support a good candidate, but instead to block a good candidate from the party the voter does not like. This attitude could be called many things: Dirty Pool, Not Kosher, Gaming the System and Unethical are some that come to mind.

Some Republican voters are hoping Foster Friess will use his considerable moral courage and energy to mount a campaign on this issue. If Friess can reform Wyoming's unfair crossover voting law, his entry into Wyoming politics will not have been in vain. It remains to be seen if enough citizens will galvanize themselves to correct this abuse of fair elections.