Are Wyoming Elections for Sale?

On August 26 the Jackson Hole News&Guide reported that Rep. Liz Storer formed a political action committee twelve days before the primary to support three candidates, one of them her husband. The paper got the formation date, the treasurer, the three donors, the late filing and the consultant, and it got six people on the record inside two weeks. It found the smallest and most completely disclosed money on the field, and it reported that accurately.

The story identifies Storer as a state representative. It failed to mention that she is president and chief executive of a private family foundation worth $89.7 million at the end of 2024 — down from $109 million three years earlier — that gives away roughly $3.3 million a year, most of it to civic organizations outside Teton County.

The committee at the center of that story raised $12,500, and every dollar of it is traceable. Storer says that is not dark money — not "like some out-of-state PACs that can't be traced back to one person or group" — because all of her committee's contributions and expenditures are reported.

She is right. Keep Jackson Whole was also, by a wide margin, the smallest and brightest money in the race. The largest was a federal PAC filing from a mailing address in Sheridan that reported spending $6,430,160.86 — of which $43,000 stayed in Wyoming. By Storer's own definition, that one is dark. Its donors are named at the Federal Election Commission, but the largest of them are other organizations — starting with a Sheridan nonprofit that never has to say who funds it — so the biggest money arrives at the FEC already untraceable to any person. And the man who signs every one of the PAC's filings as treasurer is named Ryan Lance. The Storer Foundation's website lists him among its trustees, alongside Storer and her husband.

The marketplace

Dark money is money whose original source voters cannot see before they vote. Almost everything that follows depends on knowing the difference between five legal containers. Money becomes "dark" by moving through them in sequence.

A 501(c)(3) is a charity. Gifts are tax-deductible. It may educate, register voters and lobby within limits; it may not support or oppose a candidate. Its public return lists every grant it makes by name. Its donors are redacted.

A 501(c)(4) is a "social welfare" group. Gifts are not deductible. It may do everything a charity may do and it may work on elections, as long as that isn't its primary purpose. Its return lists its grants. Its donors are redacted. This is the box "dark money" points at.

A donor-advised fund is not an organization at all. It is an account inside a 501(c)(3) charity. You give a donation, take the deduction that day, and the charity owns the money from then on. What you keep is the right to recommend where it goes — and the charity almost always follows. Its return shows what went out and to whom. It never shows who advised it.

A fiscal sponsor is a charity that houses a project with no charity of its own. Donors give to the sponsor; the sponsor issues the receipt, owns the money, and must keep real discretion over how it is spent — a sponsor that simply forwards what it is told to forward is a conduit, and the deductions fail. The project may live inside the sponsor, staff and all, or be a separate group the sponsor funds for approved charitable work. Either way, the spending appears on the sponsor's return as its own program expense, never as a grant to the project, so the project's own filings show nothing. When the project is a 501(c)(4), the sponsor may pay only for what a charity could do itself — education, organizing, research — never lobbying, never endorsements. The return cannot tell you which it paid for.

A political action committee is the opposite of all four. Contributions and expenditures above a small threshold are itemized by name, address and date, within weeks. It is the only box where you can see both ends of a transaction before an election — though sometimes the names at either end are other organizations and other PACs.

If this is getting dizzying, that is the nature of dark money.

Not usually traced back

Between 2021 and 2023 the George B. Storer Foundation granted $1,000,000 to a donor-advised fund at Schwab Charitable, designated for The Riverbend Fund.

Every private foundation in America files a Form 990-PF. One box on that form asks whether the foundation made a distribution to a donor-advised fund over which the foundation, or a "disqualified person," had advisory privileges. A disqualified person is the tax code's word for an insider — an officer, a trustee, a major donor, or a member of their family. In plain terms the box asks: did anyone inside the foundation move money through a separate fund while keeping the power to say what that money does? Yes or no.

The Storer Foundation answered yes — in 2021, in 2022 and again in 2023.

Both Storer and Propst count as insiders, and that is not a problem in itself. A private foundation may grant to a donor-advised fund, even one involving its own people. That is what the Storer Foundation did.

The form asks whether an insider advised the fund. It does not ask which one, and the answer appears on no filing anywhere. It turned up in a search: the 2015 Friends of Pathways annual report lists among its donors "The Riverbend Fund / Liz Storer and Luther Propst." A trails organization's donor list is not a tax document. It is the only public record that puts a name to the fund.

Note what the foundation gains, because it is not a deduction — a private foundation is already tax-exempt. A private foundation must give away at least 5% of its assets every year, and a grant into a donor-advised fund satisfies that requirement. The money leaves an account with a deadline and lands in one with none. The sponsor here holds $47.5 billion.

No laws broken. All of it allowable.

For scale and for balance: Jackson's own Foster Friess ran more than 99% of $20.1 million in grants through a donor-advised fund. Different politics, different size, identical method.

Channel one: the charitable money

Two kinds of money leave the foundation's orbit. The first is charitable money, which can never touch a ballot. The second, in the next section, is the kind that can.

The Storer Foundation gave away $13.3 million over four years. Its largest civic grantees are not in Jackson.

They are in Laramie, where the charity Better Wyoming has taken just over $1 million. In Cody, where the Wyoming Donor Alliance operates. In Powell, where Wyoming Rising does. In Cheyenne, the Wyoming Civic Engagement Network — WyCEN — and its 501(c)(4) sibling, the Wyoming Voter Network, have taken $1.09 million across four years. For three of those years the money took the long way around — in 2021 through a Schwab donor-advised fund, and in 2022 and 2023 through NEO Philanthropy, a New York fiscal sponsor that held it for WyCEN because WyCEN had no tax exemption of its own until February 2024. That is the fiscal-sponsor container from the list above, in use: on the foundation's return the grant reads "NEO Philanthropy"; on NEO's return it is NEO's own program spending; WyCEN, which got the benefit, filed nothing.

Better Wyoming, on whose board Liz Storer sits, has to prove it is publicly supported to remain a public charity — at least a third of its money from broad-based giving rather than a few large donors. The test counts each donor only up to 2% of the total, so anything above about $36,000 from a single donor does not count as "public." Of the $1.8 million Better Wyoming raised over five years, $1.2 million did not count. That left a public-support figure of 34.25%, against a threshold of 33⅓. Its website says, "local and state-level legislation and elections have a more profound impact on our daily lives in Wyoming than much of what takes place in Congress."

The phrase "civic engagement" appears in the foundation's own stated grant purposes in all four years.

Storer was paid $196,000 by the foundation in the most recent reporting year. Her husband, Luther Propst, joined its board of trustees on January 1, 2021, while sitting as a Teton County commissioner. None of that is hidden. All of it is on the return.

Wyoming requires elected officials to file a financial disclosure with the Secretary of State, and Storer's models good faith: trustee ex officio of the foundation, president and CEO, and one directorship — Better Wyoming — which she identifies by tax status even though the form asks only about business enterprises. She listed a nonprofit she did not have to list. That is the entire disclosure regime Wyoming applies to the people who write its laws. She complied with it completely, and it still cannot show you the million dollars.

Hold onto this: charitable money, legally walled off from elections, moving through a fund nobody has to name, to groups whose stated purpose is civic engagement.

Channel two: the money that can touch a ballot

From a mailing address in Sheridan, a 501(c)(4) called the Western Futures Fund took in $8.7 million in 2024 and gave $6.8 million to twenty-two organizations. No donors disclosed.

Five of those grants — from its 2023 and 2024 returns — land in this story:

The Way Back PAC line is only the beginning. Federal filings show Western Futures Fund putting a further $1.2 million into Way Back PAC between April 2025 and May 2026 — money that will not appear on the Sheridan group's own return until late 2027.

Way Back PAC gave $5,500 to the three candidates who won — Karyn Chin $2,500, Luther Propst $1,500, Ali Dunford $1,500. Shelter JH endorsed Chin and Dunford and recommended Propst. Storer's committee promoted all three, days before the vote.

In plain terms: one Sheridan social welfare nonprofit funded both the organization that told voters whom to back and the committee that wrote those candidates checks.

No filing moves a dollar between the Storer Foundation and Western Futures Fund, Way Back PAC or Shelter JH. The two channels never touch, and they converge anyway — on the same three candidates, through the same consultant, and through one person who was, in turn, a paid consultant to the foundation, the executive director of a Sheridan grantee, and the chair of the group that told voters whom to back.

Hold onto this: the money that can touch a ballot came from a Sheridan address that never has to name anyone, and it reached both the endorsement and the checks.

Boots on the ground

Shelter JH is a dues-paying membership organization of more than 600 people that advocates for affordable housing in Jackson Hole. On its 2023 tax form it reported $24,000 in member dues and $135,000 in contributions with no donor behind them.

Some of that money can be located — but only from the other end. The $70,000 is public because Western Futures Fund itemized it. Another route runs through the fiscal-sponsor container: the Community Foundation of Jackson Hole granted $25,014 in 2023 "for Shelter JH toward Old Bill's approved activities" and $68,659 in 2024 for "ShelterJH — education, empowerment program," both to Jackson Hole United, a 501(c)(3) that acts as Shelter JH's charitable sponsor. Those dollars are Jackson Hole United's to spend on the parts of Shelter JH's work a charity may fund; they appear on no Shelter JH filing. Everything known about who funds Shelter JH comes from its funders' returns, not its own, and even after reading them, about $65,000 of its 2023 budget has no identified source. No laws broken.

Its endorsement is one of the most valuable things a candidate can get in a Teton County election. Which makes the 2026 slate worth a second look.

In May 2025 Propst cast the only vote against the largest workforce-housing project in county history — 1,437 units, 70% of them deed-restricted, on land the public already owns. Mark Newcomb and Wes Gardner, the two commissioners the slate unseated, voted for it at every stage: the plan, the master site plan, the developer's ground lease, and the $10 million the county put in. Shelter JH, an affordable-housing organization, then recommended the lone no-voter and passed over the two yes-voters — and the reason it published had nothing to do with that vote. It concerned a different project. Shelter JH is not required to disclose the criteria or the scoring behind its selections, and it has not.

Interwoven

From 2022 through December 2024, Nikki Kaufman was an officer of Shelter JH — vice chair, then, in 2024, board chair. For 2023 and 2024 she was simultaneously executive director of the Wyoming Donor Alliance. Both organizations were Western Futures Fund grantees — the Donor Alliance took $75,000, Shelter JH $70,000. Neither one's tax return discloses the grant or the overlap, because neither is required to.

One return does name her. The Storer Foundation's 2022 filing lists, among its five highest-paid contractors, "Nicole Kaufman, Victor, Idaho — programmatic consultant, $67,087." Paying a consultant is ordinary, and the foundation disclosed the payment because the law requires it. What the disclosure shows is one person paid by the Storer Foundation in 2022, running the Wyoming Donor Alliance in 2023, and chairing Shelter JH in 2024 — with Luther Propst a trustee of that foundation the entire time, and Shelter JH recommending him in 2026.

On her own professional profile, Kaufman lists a further job over the same years: paid campaign consultant. Her published client list includes "Luther Propst for County Commissioner," "Natalia Macker for County Commissioner," "Arne Jorgensen for Town Council" and "Jonathan Schechter for Town Council."

Shelter JH's endorsement letter of October 9, 2024 — signed during her chairship — endorsed Arne Jorgensen and Natalia Macker. Both are named on her client list. The letter states its own standard on page one: "We did not consider political party affiliation, personal connections, or personal support for any candidate."

No published record shows whether the board chair took part in the endorsement votes on candidates listed as her clients.

And one name. The lead mentioned him. A man named Ryan Lance has signed every Way Back PAC registration since September 2022 as treasurer, custodian of records and designated agent. The PAC's own contributor schedule lists him giving it $1,000 in May 2024 — "Lance, Ryan, Cheyenne, self-employed, attorney." The Storer Foundation's website lists Lance among its trustees, and he is absent from the foundation's most recent return, which means he joined in 2025 or 2026 — the same window in which Way Back PAC declared Western Futures Fund a connected organization. The Wyoming Business Council lists Lance, of Cheyenne — "Conservation, Law & Land Management," president of Pathfinder Ranches, the Sweetwater River operation that runs the nation's largest sage-grouse habitat bank, until its owner sold it in January 2026 — the profile a conservation foundation recruits to its board. The foundation publishes no trustee biographies. Its next Form 990-PF, due around November 2026, prints every trustee's name and address.

The consultant

Skye Schell co-founded Shelter JH in 2016 and was its treasurer in 2022. He ran the Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance — where Storer is the second-largest funder — from 2017 to 2022.

The alliance runs the Conservation Leadership Institute, a training program that has put nearly 200 local people through thirteen rounds over a decade — among them Nikki Kaufman, Shelter JH's executive director Clare Stumpf, and Ali Dunford and Karyn Chin, two of the three Democratic primary winners. The Storer Foundation has given the alliance $465,000, on grant purposes it wrote itself: "Engaging Conservation Voters," "Northwest Wyo Civic Engagement II," "Vote Conservation 2018," "Conservation 2020."

Schell founded Yellow Tree Strategy in 2022 and, in 2023, launched Mountain Movement Strategies with Karyn Chin, who three years later was one of the three candidates who won the Democratic primary.

All three winners paid Mountain Movement — $15,814 among them. Way Back PAC's contributions to those candidates covered roughly 35% of that bill.

But the Teton primary is not where the firm's Sheridan money started. Western Futures Fund has given a second committee, Wyoming Way PAC, $210,000 across 2022 and 2024, seven-eighths of everything that committee has ever taken in. Wyoming Way paid Yellow Tree Strategy $29,500 in 2022, its second-largest payee that year, and Mountain Movement Strategies $47,805 in 2024.

The 2022 spending is worth stopping on. Every dollar of it was reported as independent expenditures supporting a moderate Republican against Chuck Gray in the Republican primary for Secretary of State.

And in 2024, in Jackson's nonpartisan town council race, Kevin Regan — then on staff at Protect Our Water Jackson Hole — hired Mountain Movement to fundraise and run his campaign. Way Back PAC gave him $10,000, the maximum, across the primary and the general. He paid Mountain Movement. Shelter JH endorsed him. He won.

One consultant, three cycles, two committees, one funder. Yellow Tree in a Republican primary in 2022. Mountain Movement in 2024. All three Democratic winners paying Mountain Movement in 2026. Western Futures Fund is behind every stage of it — and has never had to say who is behind Western Futures Fund.

Watch how the two committees differ. One pays the consultant directly, and that payment is filed with the Secretary of State. The other pays the candidate; the candidate pays the consultant; and the candidate's report is handwritten paper at the Teton County Clerk. Still no violations.

Upstream and downstream

Western Futures Fund is funded, in large part, by two nonprofits back east. The New Venture Fund sent it $1.8 million in 2024. The Sixteen Thirty Fund — a well-known left-leaning dark money fund — has sent it several million more since 2021. Sixteen Thirty is funded, in large part, by the Berger Action Fund: more than $10 million across 2016 and 2017, $31 million in 2020, $35 million in 2022. And the Berger Action Fund is associated with Hansjörg Wyss, a Swiss billionaire who lives in Wilson, Wyoming.

No document shows Wyss money reaching Sheridan. No document shows Storer Foundation money reaching Sheridan either. Sixteen Thirty and New Venture take in money from many donors and grant it back out, and the public record does not connect any donor to any grant.

What the record does show is older and more personal. Propst founded the Sonoran Institute and ran it from 1991 to 2012; the Wyss Foundation gave Sonoran $2 million between 2008 and 2012. Liz Storer's own federal contribution filings list her employer as "Sonoran Institute," occupation "Manager," in March 2012 — inside that window. In 2012 both halves of the household drew a paycheck from a Wyss Foundation grantee. Propst also sat on the board of the Conservation Lands Foundation, which took $4.5 million from Wyss in three years. Between 2018 and 2024 the Wyss Foundation put $11.2 million into Teton County — nearly all of it to human services, including Hole Food Rescue, which Ali Dunford founded.

The same architecture, opposite politics

If this reads as a Jackson Democrat problem, look at Cheyenne.

Susan Gore, the Gore-Tex heiress, built the identical machine from the other direction: the Wyoming Liberty Group (c3, 2008), Republic Free Choice (c4, 2012) and the Pillar of Law Institute — three organizations sharing staff and offices in one building, affiliated with the fifty-state State Policy Network, the c4's donors never reported. Gore and one donor who has never been publicly identified supplied over 75% of the Liberty Group's $4.3 million in its early years, and its attorney wrote an amicus brief in Citizens United. Wyoming money helped build the legal framework that made all of this possible.

And in 2026 a Texas nonprofit's federal PAC, Make Liberty Win, put $549,000 into more than forty Wyoming legislative races. Its Wyoming report lists four contributions — all four from itself. The WY Freedom PAC raised $296,500 this year, of which $165,000 — more than half — came from the State Freedom Caucus Network in Washington, D.C. A national organization supplying most of a state committee's money: the exact mirror of Western Futures Fund and Way Back PAC.

Everyone here is playing the same game by the same rules.

The calendar

Campaign finance moves fast. Tax reporting does not. Better Wyoming's most recent public financial statement was filed May 15, 2026, and covers a year that ended the previous June. When Teton County voted on August 18, 2026, the newest public numbers on the charity were fourteen months old. Its return covering the 2026 primary is not due until May 2028, because its fiscal year ends in June; Western Futures Fund's lands in late 2027. By the time the paperwork arrives, the commissioners elected this year will be halfway through their terms.

To have seen all of it before August 18, a voter would have had to work through:

Twenty-one entities — a private foundation, a donor-advised fund, a $47.5 billion sponsor, two Wyoming charities, three social welfare organizations, a Jackson housing group, a Cody donor table, two consulting firms, three political committees, three national pass-through funds, a New York fiscal sponsor, a Jackson fiscal sponsor and the community foundation that funds it. Across five states.

Six filing systems — the IRS, the Federal Election Commission, the Wyoming Secretary of State, a handwritten paper file at the Teton County Clerk, a foundation's own grant table, and a trails organization's donor list from 2015.

No two of them index to each other. None can be searched together. Only three of the twenty-one — the political committees — ever have to name a donor. The other eighteen never do.

Some things aren't for sale

Everything in this article was reported at some point, somewhere. Every figure came from a form somebody signed and filed on time. The forms just don't ask the last question, they don't arrive until the election is over, and no two of them live in the same place.

Wyoming's campaign finance laws were written for a state where you knew whose name was on the check. They were never built to withstand this kind of funding-and-filing rodeo, and they are not holding.

The Code of the West is not just a saying here — it is Wyoming law. In 2010 the Legislature adopted it as the official state code, at W.S. 8-3-123, and one of its ten principles reads: "Remember that some things are not for sale."

I hope that includes our elections.

Every dollar, entity and filing in this piece is mapped and sourced at wydarkmoney.org. Follow it yourself — and send us what you find.