Tim Lasseter

Tim Lasseter had lived in Cody for four months when he ran for the school board and for four years when, in 2022, he ran for Park County clerk.

Now with eight years in Park County under his belt, Lassseter is running for county commissioner. He said he wants to make the county’s governing body as conservatively Republican as he feels a majority of residents actually are.

“I didn’t come to Wyoming to play dress up,” Lasseter said, noting he’s worn a cowboy hat since he was old enough to fit one and spent years managing his family ranch in Missouri. “You know, I came to Wyoming as somebody that … thought I was moving to the reddest state in the nation and had that rural background, had that ranch and farm background.”

However, Lasseter said he’s found that isn’t the case at the local level.

“I’ve stayed connected to a lot of people in the community, and a lot of them asked me to run for commissioner,” he said. “And so they wanted a voice on there that they knew was a staunch conservative, a constitutional Republican, you know, and Republican is a term that gets thrown around  far too easy in this state.”

He said Wyoming would be more split between the major parties if the standard rub wasn’t that “you can’t get elected as a Democrat outside of Teton and Albany counties.”

Above all, Lasseter said he’s concerned about the current commissioners’ ideas on elections — he strongly favors hand counting ballots — and is concerned about what he said is an out-of-control planning department and planning and zoning commission, as well as a land use plan he said as added more regulations.

Election integrity was his main reason for running for clerk four years ago and he’s continued for six years now to push for hand-counted elections in the county along with a group of supporters. Lasseter said it’s a large group, as the Park County and state Republican parties have both passed resolutions in favor of hand-counting ballots. 

The commissioners have previously said their hands are tied by rulings from the attorney general, which County Attorney Bryan Skoric has interpreted as requiring the county to use machine tabulators. 

Secretary of State Chuck Gray has pushed back on that assessment, telling county commissioners that he believes the county could move to a hand-counted election. 

A law passed last legislative session will mandate a hand count of a small percentage of ballots in this year’s elections, but Lasseter told commissioners last week that’s far from enough. 

“I am a firm believer that … there is nothing more important than our vote in this country,” he said in an interview following the meeting, “and we have ceded the most important thing to a for-profit company that we can't verify, and that troubles me a great deal.”

Lasseter pointed out an issue in Texas where a county he said was using the same electronic vote tabulators as Park County uses experienced a situation where three Democrat candidates saw their vote totals zeroed out due to an error with the machines. 

“In Wyoming, we have had zero opportunity to examine a machine to compare ballots to results, actual ballots, because many, many years ago, somebody, I think, was ill informed enough that they decided that you shouldn't be able to check machine ballots against actual totals,” he said. “I think that's foolish. And in the day and age we live in now with AI and all the things that's tied into that, the ability for any software to be corrupted is huge.”

He said he’d trust fellow county residents, from both sides of the aisle, far more than a machine to count ballots. 

Above all, Lasseter, who is gearing up to celebrate 39 years with his wife, Terri, said his priorities are his family, including his grandchildren, adding he wants to be a voice for a section of the populace he feels is being ignored. 

“There’s a whole lot of people in this county that feel like they're not being represented, or that the people don’t listen to them, and that’s one of the reasons that I’m running for commissioner this time, is because of the interactions we’ve had with the commissioners over election integrity, over the land use plan,” he said. “And you know, we really feel like a lot of the concerns of the everyday people in this county or the common people were being ignored.”