Northern Wyoming News - Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years

In an effort to let all general election voters have a chance to be informed voters, the Northern Wyoming News will start a six-week series on candidate profiles starting with the Worland mayor’s race with this issue.

We have on occasion printed a special section with all the profiles together.

This year we opted to profile candidates on a weekly basis. There are two main reasons for this — economics and voter convenience.

For years I have worked for weeklies who published special sections and they often do not pay for themselves with candidates preferring to run ads in the regular paper or on different weeks than in the same section as their profile.

During those times, many voters have asked why we couldn’t put it out sooner for those who vote absentee.

When Ten Sleep had its municipal election in May, Clerk Lori Hughes asked when we would be publishing the candidate profiles. We bumped up the profiles one week to make them earlier because Hughes said a lot of people were voting early, to avoid going to the polls due to COVID-19 concerns.

That comment, and the other comments from the past stuck in my mind as the primary approached so we ran profiles early for voters who may want to vote early.

It seemed to work well for the primary so we are doing it again for the general election.

Please look inside for the Worland mayoral candidate profiles this week. Next week will be council candidates followed by Worland school board, Ten Sleep school board, state legislators and U.S. Senate and House.

We hope and we plead with you to take the time to be an informed voter. I heard local voters after the primary say they didn’t know anything about certain candidates but had seen their sign so they voted for that candidate.

Some vote party lines regardless. Some don’t take the time to find out about their candidate. This is what happened in New Hampshire. Aria DeMezzo, who won the Republican primary for the sheriff’s job in Cheshire County, New Hampshire, had on her Facebook that she is a “polyamorous transgender Mississippian lesbian anarchist atheist” According to Fox News her campaign slogan was “F*** The Police.”

In a blog on her campaign website, Dimezzo wrote, “So you’re mad. I get it. I promise you: I get it. You feel betrayed. You may even be wondering how the party that you so believed in could do something like this. But, odds are, you’re blaming me. Most people are probably angry at me, and blaming me for all this. That’s silly. I was always upfront about who I am. The good man in Rindge who looked into me found out everything he needed to know with a simple Google search …

“It’s all there. None of it is a secret. I couldn’t possibly have been more upfront about who I am, or my position on things. Did none of you pay attention to the election two years ago, when I criticized Eli Rivera [Democratic incumbent] for not going far enough with his sanctuary policy? Did none of you remember the six-foot-tall tranny who ran for sheriff and then city council?

You could have easily looked at a sample ballot prior to the election, and you could have simply looked up the candidates in a search engine. By doing so, you, like the good citizen in Rindge, would probably have been appalled, and probably wouldn’t have voted for me. I wouldn’t have begrudged you for that. I was, after all, rather upfront about it. I went into it expecting that I would lose the primary to a write-in candidate, because I didn’t think that so many voters were just … completely and totally oblivious about who they are voting for.”

Whether you vote absentee or in person at the polls, take the time to know who you are voting for this election and why.