Wyoming is one of the most conservative states in the country, and the people who call it home live accordingly—building businesses, helping their neighbors, serving in their churches, and instilling those same values of faith, family, freedom, and heritage in their children. But Wyoming’s conservative culture is increasingly under pressure from out-of-state progressive organizations that worm their way into our communities under unassuming names.
The League of Women Voters of Wyoming is one such organization.
This might come as a surprise to some readers. The League of Women Voters of Wyoming describes itself as “a nonpartisan organization with expertise in voting and elections,” and the group’s parent organization, the widely known League of Women Voters (LWV), says it is “a nonpartisan, grassroots nonprofit dedicated to empowering everyone to fully participate in our democracy.” Since its founding in 1920, LWV has claimed to help register voters and host forums where candidates explain their stances. Sounds commendable, right?
The earnest, civic-sounding language, however, masks the group’s opposition to election integrity and support for radical progressive causes that extend far beyond the voting booth. The LWV and its fundraising and education arm, the League of Women Voters Education Fund, have received millions of dollars from powerful leftwing nonprofits like the Carnegie Corporation of New York, NEO Philanthropy, and others. In other words, what you see with LWV and its state chapters like the League of Women Voters of Wyoming is not what you get.
The League of Women Voters and its affiliates present themselves as friendly, nonpartisan advocates for democracy — think neighborly volunteers helping communities register to vote and stay informed. The image they project is one of wholesome, salt-of-the-earth patriots, the kind of people you might find involved in the local Lions Club or VFW.
But beneath that folksy exterior lies an organization whose real priorities are undermining election integrity and advancing a progressive agenda, even in conservative states like Wyoming.
The League of Women Voters of Wyoming made news again during the 2026 legislative session when it took aim at a series of commonsense election integrity bills. The bills sought to restore confidence in Wyoming’s election system at a time when Americans, having witnessed election officials across the county alter and suspend voting rules during the COVID-19 pandemic, are increasingly skeptical that their votes will be counted accurately.
Further, The ACLU of Wyoming joined with the League of Women Voters of Wyoming to oppose and misrepresent bills like SF 30. What did SF 30 seek to do? It clarified a small aspect of existing election law related to residency requirements. That’s it. The bill established zero barriers to voting, but that didn’t stop progressive advocacy organizations from claiming otherwise. Another bill, HB 48, would have required paper ballots for all in-person voting—a fair, tamper-resistant method of voting that would have reinforced Wyoming’s reputation for principled governance. For those groups, any effort to strengthen the security and integrity of our voting systems is suspect and immediately parroted as suppressing voter’s rights. Hint: that’s not what they do.
For those who know about the League of Women Voters of Wyoming’s actual record of lobbying, as opposed to its deceptive rhetoric, none of this is surprising. For decades, LWV and its state and local affiliates have sided with Democrats against even the most basic election reforms championed by conservatives. Time and time again, LWV, which portrays itself as a kind of impartial, nonideological expert on voting and elections, has gone into a meltdown whenever someone even whispers the word “voter ID.” When lawmakers introduce voter ID bills, or they become law, LWV mobilizes its state and local chapters, petitions its deep-pocketed progressive donors, applies pressure to lawmakers, and lets loose its attorneys. The League of Women Voters of Wyoming was among the fiercest critics of a voter ID requirement that was signed into law in Wyoming in 2021, for example.
LWV’s position here is utterly disqualifying. Voter ID requirements are the bare minimum when it comes to election integrity. Most countries around the world compel voters to identify themselves before they cast a ballot (a no-brainer!), and supermajorities of Americans, including Democratic Party voters, say they support voter ID laws. The only reason an organization, especially one whose mission is related to voting and elections, gets something as simple as voter ID this wrong is because it has embraced a progressive ideology that is fundamentally detached from reality .
In practice, what LWV is pushing for is an election system that allows anyone and everyone to vote, whether or not they’re qualified to do so. Of course, LWV wouldn’t put it like that; its members and leadership would tell you that federal and state laws already prohibit illegal immigrants from casting ballots so voter ID requirements are unnecessary. But if they really cared about keeping illegal immigrants from voting, they wouldn’t actively fight every measure that enables state and federal election officials to enforce those existing statutes.
To quote Maya Angelou, one of the left’s favorite writers, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
But it gets so much worse.
Although LWV portrays itself as an organization devoted to voting rights, it advocates and lobbies for just about every progressive hobby horse under the sun. The group supports amnesty for illegal immigrants, abortion, expanding the definition of sex in federal law to include “gender identity,” and gun control. LWV even dedicates resources to combating school choice, because nothing says “empowering voters” like fighting to keep low-income families in failing public schools.
Earlier this year, LWV filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in Little v. Hecox, a case about laws prohibiting men and boys who identify as transgender from playing in the same sports leagues as women and girls. To be clear, the case has nothing to do with voting or elections. Can you guess on which side of the case LWV came down? If you guessed LWV argued for pitting women and girls against male athletes, you would be correct. Like its stance on voter ID laws, LWV’s defense of men in women’s sports put it in a minority of Americans—even among Democrats!
The League of Women Voters of Wyoming is generally quieter than its parent organization in D.C. about its many progressive commitments, but it has nevertheless strayed far from the topic of elections and voting on multiple occasions, even as it devotes much of its time each legislative session to lobbying against election integrity bills.
One egregious example in particular serves to illustrate why the group’s claim of nonpartisanship is so insincere. In January 2021, the League of Women Voters of Wyoming endorsed and broadcast a message from its national leaders accusing President Trump of instigating the January 6 breach of the U.S. Capitol and calling for him to be “immediately removed as President of the United States of America and banned from running for federal office ever again.” At the same time, LWV urged Congress to certify Joe Biden’s victory, calling Republican concerns about the process “political theater,” even though the country was in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and many states had changed their voting systems at the last minute under the guise of an emergency.
LWV’s demand that Congress waste no time certifying the election results in favor of Biden contrasts sharply with how the group treated U.S. Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings. In Fall 2020, shortly after President Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the U.S. Supreme Court, Susan M. Simpson, the then-president of the League of Women Voters of Wyoming, cautioned Wyoming’s U.S. Senate delegation against “rushing the Supreme Court nomination process.”
In theory, Simpson’s advice sounds unobjectionable, prudent even. The problem is that there was no evidence at the time, and there is no evidence now, the U.S. Senate “rushed” Barrett’s confirmation (she sat through over 20 hours of questioning over two days). Most importantly, slow-walking the hearings was part of a concerted Democratic Party strategy to ensure Barrett’s nomination was not put up to a vote until after the November 2020 election. Leftwing strategists believed Democrats would be on firmer ground if Biden won the presidency to try to deny Trump his right to select a new U.S. Supreme Court justice. Democratic Party officials and countless progressive organizations, such as Planned Parenthood, all complained the process was rushed, even though it wasn’t, and like Simpson pressured Congress to delay, delay, delay.
Or take a more recent example of the group’s hypocrisy. On January 31, 2026, the League of Women Voters of Wyoming said Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray’s recent decision to share voter registration lists with the U.S. Department of Justice “undermines public confidence in our election process,” suggesting there’s something untoward about states working with the federal government on election integrity. But notably, the League of Women Voters of Wyoming had nothing to say about H.R. 1, the “For the People Act,” which Democrats in Congress failed to enact in 2021. H.R. 1 would have centralized control of election administration in the federal government, violating the U.S. Constitution. Although the League of Women Voters of Wyoming released no statement on H.R. 1, the national organization supported the bill and pushed for its enactment.
The pattern is clear—and partisan. When a Republican like Gray complies with a lawful request from the U.S. Department of Justice to share voter roll data, groups like the League of Women Voters of Wyoming cry foul, complaining of federal overreach. But when Democrats propose to expand federal control of elections, the League of Women Voters of Wyoming is silent.
All of this reveals an organization fundamentally at odds with Wyoming’s conservative values — and it’s not even close. The League of Women Voters of Wyoming is not a moderate or centrist group that has simply drifted left over time. On the contrary, many of its positions — such as its support for men in women’s sports — place it well to the left of most Democrats.
Like its parent organization in Washington, D.C., the Wyoming chapter hides behind a respectable, nonpartisan facade while actively lobbying for policies that undermine election integrity and advance a progressive agenda. It presents itself as a grassroots, homegrown organization, but it is neither. It functions as an extension of D.C.-based progressive networks and their major donors.
Whenever someone challenges LWV’s nonpartisan reputation by pointing to its long history of progressive advocacy, its leaders will say that “nonpartisan” means only that it doesn’t endorse candidates. But this is misleading. The group, in spite of its many progressive commitments, does not advertise itself as a left-leaning organization. When people hear the term “nonpartisan,” they do not typically think of advocacy and lobbying groups. For LWV, the term “nonpartisan” is a smoke screen.
It’s no crime, of course, for an organization to advocate for bad ideas like progressivism, but it should be clear about what it stands for—and to whom it is beholden. Through LWV and its state chapters, the web of progressive foundations that hold so much influence in the Democratic Party are able to push their agendas—transgender ideology, noncitizen voting, abortion, opposition to parental rights—in conservative states like Wyoming.
The League of Women Voters of Wyoming is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It joins many other organizations in Wyoming whose respectable names also mask their radical ideas and ties to D.C, and we’ve helped expose many of them. The Wyoming chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (WY-AAP), for example, fights to undermine parental rights and supports transgender healthcare for minors on behalf of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The Wyoming Library Association (WLA) lobbies on behalf of the American Library Association (ALA) against reasonable restrictions on age-inappropriate books in local libraries, making it harder for families to protect their children from subversive ideas about gender and explicit sexual content (are you noticing a pattern?). In each case, the organizations are beholden not to Wyomingites but rather to their out-of-state parent organizations and the powerful groups that fund them.
The only way to defend Wyoming’s conservative heritage is to be clear-eyed about the groups undermining it—and not let them take us for fools.