CASPER (WNE) —  The Wyoming Republican Party has begun the process of finding an interim secretary of state.

The state GOP announced Friday that it will hold a central committee meeting on Sept. 24 to nominate three possible replacements for Ed Buchanan, who left office this week for a judgeship.

The meeting is open to the public and will take place at 1 p.m. at Pavillion’s Wind River Recreation Center.

Buchanan did not run for reelection and recently vacated his seat to take a position as a district judge in Goshen County.

The secretary of state is Wyoming’s No. 2 elected official. The office oversees elections as well as business registrations, among other things.

The central committee — which is made up of three Republican leaders from each Wyoming county — will choose three candidates at the Sept. 24 meeting. Gov. Mark Gordon will then appoint one of them to fill out the roughly three months remaining on Buchanan’s term.

Gordon is statutorily required to make a pick within five days.

The state GOP used the same procedure after Jillian Balow left her post as superintendent of public instruction in January. That process spurred a lawsuit led by former Speaker of the Wyoming House Tom Lubnau.

He and others alleged the appointment violated the state and U.S. constitutions because it defied the “one man-one vote” principle. That’s because each county had the same number of votes (three), despite drastically different populations in some cases.

The lawsuit failed, and Lubnau said he does not plan to bring a suit over the coming secretary nomination process.

Buchanan’s replacement will be required to oversee the November general election after only a couple weeks in the job.