Tara Nethercott Challenges Chuck Gray on Election Integrity

In a recent Wyoming Republican Secretary of State 2022 candidate forum hosted at the Boys and Girls Club in Casper, Sen. Tara Nethercott, R-Cheyenne, and Rep. Chuck Gray, R-Casper, sparred over questions of election integrity.

Tara Nethercott and Chuck Gray (courtesy)

The Secretary of State is elected to a four-year term and oversees the administration of matters that include the registration of business entities, statewide elections, lobbyist registrations, ethics filings, and campaign finance (among others).

Mr. Gray states early in the discussion, “I’m running a campaign focused on trying to improve our election systems. The Secretary of State oversees elections in our state.” Gray has been serving in the Wyoming House of Representatives (District 57) since 2017. Prior to his political career, Gray had a radio talk show in Casper on KVOC.

“That’s why we need to ban ballot drop boxes, which are a vehicle for ballot harvesting. We need to have paper ballots. We need to have a hand audit of the count,” Gray argues.

Gray’s campaign for Secretary of State, he says, is all about improving election systems. His position assumes there are widespread problems with Wyoming’s voting and election processes. It also assumes, by his own characterization of the 2020 election, the United States needs to improve election security because of election fraud.

Claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election have been debunked repeatedly. Films like Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules have been widely discredited. For example, seventeen Republican Michigan lawmakers formally asked Attorney General Dana Nessel to investigate the claims of the film. Numerous experts who have reviewed the film say 2000 Mules is unreliable and does not prove that ballot drop box fraud took place in five key states. Despite the film’s dramatic presentation, it reaches conclusions not supported by its own material.

Still, Gray says, “I think it’s pretty clear what happened and we’ve been doing 2000 Mules screenings around the state.”

Gray also blames the media for refusing to acknowledge issues of election integrity even though media and news organizations have investigated these issues to the point of exhaustion.

Ms. Nethercott’s position is significantly different from Gray’s. Nethercott is a Wyoming Senator and a practicing attorney. She graduated from the University of Wyoming Law School in 2009, where she was student body president.

“There has been no objective evidence to indicate that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen,” Nethercott says.

“We know that the best experts in the world have evaluated this—all the money that Americans know has been devoted to evaluating this issue—and there’s been no persuasive evidence brought forward to indicate that the election was stolen,” Nethercott argues.

Defending the conclusions of many Republicans that the 2020 election was not stolen, Nethercott says, “Continued allegations to the contrary are undermining our country.”