Dear editor:

We in Park County and the great state of Wyoming attempted to communicate to our  legislators about property taxes. Through the valiant efforts of many, a referendum to put the topic on our next ballot was initiated. However, many of the citizens of Wyoming are under the mistaken impression that they will continue to be a registered voter in this great state whether or not they vote. (To date only 37% are registered down from 52% in 2023).

Please educate our populace, as newspapers are supposed to do, by informing them that if they did not vote in the last general election (not the primary) they are purged from the voter rolls.  

This being the case, our hardworking folks who brought us the referendum that would have put the property tax topic on the ballot has failed because too many people who signed it were not registered Wyoming voters. If you sign an official petition you are struck off if you are not a registered Wyoming voter. You make the job of representing your voice very difficult.  

We in the these United States of America are a constitutional republic. It requires the citizens to participate. If you do not, tyrants move in, elect themselves into office and our great country falls into mob-ocracy (democracy if you will) then into oligarchy, anarchy and demise. If you do not know how computer code is written, you may not understand that it can do amazing things, such as delete malicious subroutine programming after skewing a result. If software is not available for inspection prior to its use; let us say in an election tabulation, once it has skewed the results and deleted its subroutine, one would never know unless perhaps the  physical ballots were hand counted. Hard to do when a department preemptively destroys them before they are allowed to do so and before they can be verified.  

President Ronald Reagan said famously “Trust, but Verify” and this should be the basis for all  that we do in our constitutional republic. Anyone who attempts to prevent the citizens from verifying anything should be removed from office. We can lose our country, indeed we are, because those who are stealing it count on everyone else ‘trusting’ the criminal, but not allowing the verification. Ballots were hand counted long before ‘machines’ did, why are the clerks so afraid of the verification? Statutes do not prevent the hand counting, they just  ensure that all parties are represented. What are the county clerks afraid of? Why is the software not allowed to be checked? Why are machines not monitored for transmission during  the elections? So many questions and no one is offering answers.  

Robin Berry  

Cody