2024 Emergency Wyoming Election

The 2024 Emergency Wyoming Elections, officially the Wyoming Special Election, was an election held on April 10th, 2026 in the U.S. state of Wyoming in the aftermath of the destruction of Cheyenne, the state capital, alongside the vast majority of the state government. The election was called by the Wyoming Emergency Government in Casper, the emergency state capital. The election was posed as a state mandated ballot initiative to dissolve the constitution of Wyoming, and cede each county to it's nearest neighboring state. The ballot initiative failed, setting up the dramatic events that led to the Northern Occupation, the forced occupation of Wyoming by her neighborhing states. This election is widely considered to be the start of the Grimtide, the deadliest event in United States history.

On the morning of March 30th, 2024, unidentified forces stowing away in semi-trucks surprised the Wyoming State Capital, then in deliberation over a cannabis legalization bill (Proposition 28)

The election was conducted less then one month following the attacks on Cheyenne by what were then unknown entities and assailants. Voters were split along two lines: proximity to Larimer County, where the attack took place, and then along libertarian lines of thought, a popular brand of right-wing thinking inside Wyoming at the time and much of the northern US as well. The election dominated political news across the United States as part of the larger and hefty news coverage of the greater Crisis of the 21st Century, which had only just begun with this election and was not yet called this by contemporary Americans (at the time, most American news outlets reffered to it as "the Cheyenne Crisis", though this would change quickly in the coming months.)

The results were not what any neighboring state had wanted, nor the Federal government. Wyoming was seen as too disparate without Cheyenne to be properly governed, and the institutions necessary for a state government did not exist in any capacity in any other location in the state, as stated by Emergency Governor Clarence Cork, the former Secreatary of State elevated to the Governorship thanks to him being in Cody at the time of the attacks. With only five representatives and two senators, the temporary state government had realized quite quickly that they did not, in fact, have the faculties necessary for the governance of the state, even a state as depopulated as Wyoming. Wyomingites overwhelmingly voted in favor of continued sovereignty, roundly rejecting the calls for the states elites and powerful in Casper and Gillette. Two weeks following the elections, Wyoming was forcibly incorporated into it's neighboring states via combination ballot initiative in North Dakota, Utah and Colorado, alongside a bevy of Executive Orders issued by President Anderson. These directly led to the Casper Riots, though these were overshadowed by the Attack on New York City. Despite fierce resistance, Wyoming was eventually subsumed and would not come back into being until the Grimtide had ended in 2040.

The riots, the dissolution, and the elections in Wyoming had profound impacts on the upcoming Presidential Election of 2024 and America as a whole, which pit incumbent Democrat Clark Anderson against upstart Florida Governor Richard Trunchard, a far-right Republican and a Christian fascist (see: Seed Revival). Democratic leadership stressed the importance of unity and harsh practicality, while coming off as aloof and out of touch to most common Americans during the early stages of the Grimtide, while Republican leadership pushed conspiracy theories about the origin of the attacks on Wyoming and NYC, including the idea that forces aligned with the "Deep State" had detonated a new nuclear weapon that only targeted certain aspects of reality, such as patriotism and devotion. This would help feed into what was later termed the Great American Farce, the seemingly concerted effort by millions of Americans to pretend that genetically engineered child super-soldiers underneath a program managed by the CIA, FBI and Homeland Security had not gone rogue and begun their quest to purge the United States of everybody who could not genetically handle the modifications they sought to force on the population.