They also would not be able to make that change at the polls on the day of the primary election or when requesting an absentee ballot, although those particular restrictions don’t apply if the voters are changing affiliation between minor parties or if they’re unaffiliated.

Crossover voting has been a topic that’s come before the Legislature several times since the 2014 elections, Zwonitzer said. The practice came to the forefront in particular during the last election cycle as some Democrats crossed over to the Republican Party to vote for Rep. Liz Cheney, who ultimately lost her race to Rep. Harriet Hageman.

“The drumbeat gets louder, the cry gets louder about, ‘We got to do something,’” Zwonitzer said before the committee “And I think this last primary election season 94% of the state voted in the Republican primary. Certainly an issue there.

“What I’m attempting to do is a very small step to say we’ve done something, because we’ve kind of had this all or nothing approach now for the past decade.”

Zwonitzer’s bill passed in a 5-3 vote. Reps. Jeremy Haroldson, R-Wheatland, Christopher Knapp, R-Gillette, and Pepper Ottman, R-Riverton, voted no. Rep. Cody Wylie, R-Rocks Springs, was excused.

The other proposed legislation, House Bill 103, sponsored by Rep. Jeremy Haroldson, R-Wheatland, is more restrictive.

The blackout period for changing party affiliation would be 45 days before the primary election, and 14 days before the general election.

“Moving into this session, once again, it was an overwhelming drive by my constituents to say, ‘Hey, we need to address, we need to talk about this once again,’” Haroldson said.

While both Zwonitzer’s and Haroldson’s bills impose greater restrictions, neither are as stringent as some of the options that initially came before the House Corporations Committee Monday afternoon.

Haroldson’s bill, as it was originally written, would have barred voters from changing their party affiliation after the first day of the candidate filing period. In other words, voters wouldn’t have been able to see what their options were before deciding which party ticket they wanted to vote on.

“Help me understand how that’s good for the voters if they don’t even know who’s running for office,” committee Chair Jared Olsen, R-Cheyenne, asked Haroldson, who explained that this was the cutoff date that his constituents have “overwhelmingly” been asking for.

But the committee ended up adopting an amendment to the bill brought forward by Rep. Steve Harshman, R-Casper, to change that deadline, barring voters from changing party affiliation within 45 days prior to a primary election instead. The bill, with Harshman’s amendment, ended up passing in a 7-1 vote. Rep. Mike Yin, D-Jackson, voted no. Wylie was excused.

Another bill sponsored by Rep. Cyrus Western, R-Big Horn, would have done the same thing as Haroldson’s bill before it was amended. The committee didn’t end up voting on Western’s House Bill 141 since it was the same as House Bill 103.

Secretary of State Chuck Gray favored House Bills 141 and 103, telling the committee that he believes “crossover voting has undermined the sanctity of Wyoming’s primary process” in the past several election cycles. He also specifically said he supported the stricter cutoff date for party affiliation changes.

“I prefer the start of the filing period as the deadline, because I think your party affiliation membership really transcends who the candidates are,” Gray said.

But Gail Symons, owner of the nonpartisan blog Civics307, warned of the unintended consequences of restricting party affiliation changes to this degree.

“Be careful of what you ask for,” Symons said. “You shut down party affiliation changes in the cycle, and I guarantee you that you just kill what’s left of the Democratic Party, because everybody who cares about who gets elected to any office is going to change to Republican and stay there.”

Mary Lankford, a lobbyist for the County Clerks Association of Wyoming, said that clerks would be able to administer the processes in either of the bills but that House Bill 103 in particular would require “pretty heavy voter education for the public so that they aren’t caught short.”