Utah
Ballot Security
What Politicians Say
The state’s election system has so far survived the new Republican skepticism over vote-by-mail.
Following the lead of Oregon, Washington and Colorado, Utah began experimenting with mail-in voting in 2012 before adopting it statewide in 2019. It is now the only Republican-led state among the eight that have all-mail elections.
But former President Donald Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting have raised new questions in a state where it previously was not controversial.
Yet a bill to end vote-by-mail without an excuse failed to make it out of committee. An initiative to move back to traditional Election Day voting in person also fell short of qualifying for the November 2022 ballot by more than 100,000 signatures.
Republican Governor Spencer Cox defended mail-in voting during a governors’ summit in 2022, saying it was important to push back against “misinformation spread by any party.”
Since 2020, Cox has signed a number of smaller measures, including removing dead voters from the rolls more regularly, requiring video surveillance of ballot drop boxes and tightening voter ID requirements.
Ease of Voting
Other new laws allow voters to receive text messages or emails when their ballot has been counted and set a deadline for voters to fix a rejected ballot.
Ballot Security
Lawmakers also passed legislation in 2021 and 2022 requiring local elections administrators to keep track of how many uncounted ballots remain at the end of each day, requiring an annual statewide audit of the voter rolls and barring private donations to run elections, such as the grants local elections administrators requested and received from Meta Platforms Inc Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg in 2020.
Read More: Zuckerberg’s Election Aid Spurs GOP Drive in 30 States to Ban It
How Politicians Responded to the 2020 Election
Attorney General Sean Reyes supported a Texas lawsuit seeking to have the Supreme Court intervene in the election.
Two of Utah’s four Republican US representatives objected to the certification of Biden electors from Pennsylvania.