Albany County Clerk race pits familiar face against political newcomer

Deputy County Clerk Kayla White has worked in the office for 15 years — 13 as second-in-command. Challenger Sue Reding has worked in business administration and church ministry.

When voters head to the polls early next month, Albany County will have to choose its next county clerk — the official responsible for running local elections, coordinating the Albany County Commission’s agenda and overseeing the county government’s budget.

Both candidates for the office ran uncontested in their respective primaries. On the 2022 General Election ballot, voters will see:

• Sue Reding, a Republican outsider seeking to trim down the office and beef up what she sees as an electoral system ripe for fraud, and promising to bring a fresh perspective to the office.

• Kayla White, a Democratic insider, who has served as the current county clerk’s deputy for 13 years and is touting her extensive experience in the office as her number one strength.

Reding and White appeared on stage together last week during a debate moderated by the Laramie Reporter and hosted by the UW Political Science and Criminal Justice clubs.

The candidates spoke — and lightly sparred — on topics ranging from absentee voting to working with political rivals to their own diverse backgrounds.

Extensive experience vs. fresh perspective

White said her decade-plus of experience in the county clerk’s office has prepared her for the various duties required of a county clerk — issuing vehicle titles and marriage licenses, recording land documents, working closely with the county commissioners and running local elections.

She said her opponent, Reding, would face “a steep learning curve.”

“Aspiring to lead an office without working your way up to the top of the office is not the way to do it,” White said. “I had a mentor for 15 years. There will be no mentor like Jackie (Gonzales), to help her learn how to serve the community, following all the regs and utilizing all the relationships needed to best serve the public.”

Reding admitted she’d be new to the office and unfamiliar with its specific responsibilities.

“However, I have a long history of experience in business administration and in ministry — actually, 30 years of it,” she said. “What I can bring to the office of the county clerk is a new perspective. The current perspective has been there for 40-plus years. And I just believe that a fresh voice and a fresh perspective is what's needed in that office. I think that when you have the same people running an office for a long period of time, there's a lot of things that you miss.”

Reding graduated this year with a BA in church ministry from Family of Faith Christian University. The university’s “statement of faith” — which is prominently displayed on its website — takes a clear hardline stance against same-sex marriage.

“The term ‘marriage’ has only one meaning: the uniting of one man and one woman in a single, exclusive union, as delineated in Scripture,” the statement reads. “Any form of sexual immorality (including adultery, fornication, cohabitation, homosexual behavior, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, or use of pornography) is sinful and offensive to God.”

The university also denies the validity of trans people, alleging that “rejection of one’s biological sex is a rejection of the image of God within that person.”

The 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges prohibited states from outlawing same-sex marriage, effectively legalizing gay and lesbian marriages across the country, even in states that still had anti-gay laws on the books. But soon after, a county clerk in Kentucky made national headlines when she started refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses, citing her religious objections.

She was ultimately stopped in this effort by order of a court — and was even briefly jailed — but she gained some level of fame and respect in right-wing religious circles for her anti-marriage equality stance. She even met with the pope.

In Albany County, Reding would not say she supports marriage equality, but did say her own beliefs would not conflict with the duties of the office.

“I think my beliefs regarding that are probably something that I can keep to myself,” she said. “But I would do the job of the county clerk. Whatever the law says, that's what I would do.”

Election integrity and misinformation

Voter fraud is rare in the United States — a country that in 2020 ran the “most secure” election it’s ever conducted. But allegations of voter fraud are growing more common, driven in large part by the misinformation and outright disinformation advanced by motivated political actors.

Wyoming is no different — either in its actual robust election security or in its playing host to rampant unfounded allegations of voter fraud.

But Reding has made election security a cornerstone of her campaign.

“Our country is really at a crossroads regarding our elections, which affects our whole country, because people have such worries about the election,” she said. “We need to be more careful about what we do in the elections. To reduce absentee ballots would be a better thing. And, yes, that reduces people's ability, their freedom in voting. But we've had times in the past in our history where people had to vote on one day, for heaven's sake — we could go back to that.”

Reding said she is not concerned by the possibility that restricting absentee voting would lower voter turnout. (It’s not clear whether restricting absentee voting actually would impact turnout, and some experts argue that restrictions of this sort do little to actually change turnout.)

“I'm more concerned about people that have a lot of concerns about the election not voting at all, because they don't think their vote counts,” Reding said. “And I think that we should be looking at ways to help people feel more confident.”

By contrast, White said the right of Wyomingites to vote absentee should be defended — at least for as long as it remains legal.

“I believe that people that choose to vote absentee do it because it's a choice,” White said. “People can vote 45 days prior to every election, and they can request an absentee ballot and they have that right. So I think until that right is taken away from them, I think we have to facilitate that as county clerks.”

About half of Albany County voted absentee during the 2020 election. That election occurred at the outset of the 2020 COVID-19 winter spike, which killed hundreds of Wyomingites and encouraged countless others to eschew social gatherings and public appearances. (In 2020, on election night itself, a full 2 percent of the county was infected with COVID-19.)

The absentees were the last to be counted, and flipped some races from a seemingly clear Republican victory to a close Democratic win (such as in the Albany County Commission race).

Absentee ballots favored Democrats possibly because Democrats take COVID-19 and precautionary measures more seriously, and thus were more likely to avoid the polling center and vote by mail.

Despite this, unfounded claims of voting irregularities have spread in Albany County, fed by the aforementioned national narratives about election fraud.

“I believe that if a candidate feels that if an election has been rigged, they need to bring some kind of evidence forward to the county clerk's office so that investigation can be done,” White said during the debate. “There have been a lot of allegations of fraud in the United States — and not mainly in Albany County, but there have been rumblings of it — but there's never been any evidence. I think the biggest part is to bring some sort of evidence forward. And if there is no evidence, there's not an investigation that needs to be done.”

Reding said the lack of evidence does not put her concerns to rest.

“I think evidence can sometimes be hard to find, especially if a lot of ballots are going out, and they're going to addresses where people don't live and then other people are picking them up and filling them out,” Reding said. “That's really hard to track.”

Both candidates said they support Wyoming’s new Voter ID law. Neither took a position on ranked choice voting.

Vote centers and paper ballots

White has advocated for establishing vote centers — centralized locations where voters from any precinct could go and cast their ballots. This would be a shift from the current set-up, wherein voters on Election Day have to cast their ballots in their own specific precinct’s polling place.

“It allows the electors the ability to vote where they see fit,” White said. “They don't have one specific polling place where they can go.”

Reding said this issue could also impact election security, but spoke mainly about the presence of electronic voting systems when the topic of vote centers was raised during the debate.

“I'm actually against this because I think that the more electronics that we have involved with voting, the more ability there is for nefarious things to happen,” she said. “And I am a computer programmer, I know what can happen, how code can be changed, how it can be manipulated. And as far as our elections go, I think the more we can stay with paper … the better that we are. I think that's a safer way to do it.”

But White said vote centers are actually more secure than the alternative. The county would be running fewer total polling places if it established vote centers.

“I agree, in some sense, that yes, paper is better,” White said. “But this (establishing vote centers) also does ensure that one person can't vote in two places. So, it actually is helping with the integrity of the election and does not allow somebody to vote twice in one election.”