By Michael Illiano

The Sheridan Press

Via Wyoming News Exchange

SHERIDAN — When the Wyoming Republican Party meets at its convention next month, the party will consider changes to the process used to elect presidential candidates in Wyoming.

Bryan Miller, the chairman of the Sheridan County Republican Party, has spent the past year as chair of a committee charged with examining the party primary process in the state that he said was a response to voter dissatisfaction during the 2016 presidential election.

“[During the presidential primaries] a couple of years ago, a lot of people showed up at the Republican County Caucus with the flawed assumption that they could, just like they could in Iowa, vote for their candidate for president,” Miller said. “Since that’s not the way we did it, a lot of people went home mad.”

Currently, Wyoming Republicans hold a caucus to choose delegates to send to the Republican National Convention, where the delegates cast votes to choose the Republican presidential nominee.

Wyoming sends 29 delegates to the RNC and under the current procedure, more than half of those delegates are chosen at the party’s state convention.

The change Miller’s committee is proposing, which has been dubbed the “Cowboy Compromise,” would more closely resemble a presidential primary, where registered Republicans can vote for their preferred candidate on the county level, and each county would send one delegate to the RNC to vote for the candidate that wins the county.

In this system, 23 of the state’s delegates would be chosen directly by voters at the county level. The Republican state chairman, national committeewoman and national committeeman are automatically sent to the RNC as unpledged “super delegates,” and, under the Cowboy Compromise, the remaining three delegates would be elected at the state convention.

“The ultimate goal is to allow every Republican in the state to vote for the presidential candidate when it actually matters,” Miller said.

Miller said the change would have to be approved by the national Republican party, which may not make a decision until October. This means Wyoming Republicans will have to make a change to the party bylaws during their convention next month that would allow them to enact the change should the national party approve it; the state party is only allowed to change bylaws during conventions, which occur every two years.

The bylaw change could simply state that if the national party approves the Cowboy Compromise, the state would adopt it. However, Miller said if Republicans at the state convention do not want to adopt the compromise as is, his committee will still push the party to adopt a bylaw change that will allow it to change voting procedures before the next presidential election.

“We don’t want to leave it the way it was because people, at large, did not get the opportunity to vote,” Miller said. “Everyone on the committee is committed to changing the process.”

The Wyoming Republican Party will hold its convention April 19-21 in Laramie. The next Republican National Committee meeting will be May 12 in Coronado, California.