Wyoming

A voter already on the rolls had to declare or change party by May 13, three months before the primary. A voter registering for the first time may declare a party when registering — including at the polling place on election day, which Wyoming permits. So party affiliation is not a field with a single cutoff; it is two rules selected by whether the record already existed. Anything treating the affiliation deadline as one date will misclassify every voter who registered after it, and a party breakdown taken in May does not describe the electorate that votes in August.

Wyoming's 31 senate seats split by parity rather than by a published schedule: the 2024 general carried fifteen districts, all even-numbered from 2 to 30, and 2026 carries the sixteen odd-numbered ones. A pipeline that models staggering as a per-seat term-expiry table has to derive it from results, and one that assumes half the chamber runs each cycle gets the wrong half. This cycle also carries the Sixth District — an even number — to fill an unexpired term, so parity predicts the rule but not the exceptions.

The filing period ran May 14 to May 29 — opening the day after the party affiliation deadline closed. But minor and provisional party candidates file by August 17, the day before the primary, and independent candidates by August 24, six days after it, on 5,263 statewide signatures. A new political party had to qualify by May 1 on the same signature count. So the November ballot is not fixed by the August primary; three separate access routes close on three different sides of it.

Registration formally closed for the primary on August 3 and for the general on October 19. Neither is the end. Voters may still register in person and cast an absentee ballot from August 4 to August 17 and from October 20 to November 2, and may register and vote at their polling place on election day itself. A registration deadline in this state marks a change of method, not a cutoff, and a rolls snapshot taken on the closing date understates the eventual electorate.

Every county is run by its county clerk — one office, one directory, no second model and no consolidated city-counties to except. The Census of Governments and the state agree at 23, which is not true of the family's other states: Colorado administers 64 counties while the Census counts 62, and Montana 56 against 54, in both cases because consolidated city-counties are classified as municipal. Wyoming is the control case that shows the discrepancy elsewhere is real rather than a counting artifact.

Precinct labels in the official results are compound — 13-1, 13-2, 14-0, 01-01 — where the leading segment is the house district and the trailing one the precinct within it. So a precinct identifier is only unique inside its county, its first component changes at every legislative redistricting, and the formatting is not consistent between counties: Albany writes 13-1 where Laramie writes 01-01 and Niobrara writes 1-2. Joining precincts across counties or across cycles on the printed label will silently mismatch.

Wyoming elects five statewide executives — governor, secretary of state, state auditor, state treasurer and superintendent of public instruction — and no lieutenant governor exists to elect. The secretary of state is the office that stands first in the line of succession, so a model that expects a governor-and-deputy ticket has no candidate to attach, and one that treats the secretary of state as purely administrative misses that it is also the succession office.

Proposed Initiative Proposition Number One asks whether to establish a property tax exemption of fifty percent of assessed value on a qualified homeowner's primary residence, with residency and occupancy conditions attached. It qualified on 40,669 signatures against a February 6 filing deadline, and statewide propositions pass only on a majority of those voting in the general election rather than a majority on the question — so an undervote counts against it. That threshold is easy to model wrongly and changes what passing means.