St. George • If southwestern Utah residents voting by mail want to ensure their ballot is counted, Washington County Clerk/Auditor Ryan Sullivan has some timely advice: Don’t wait until the last minute.
State law requires mail-in ballots to be postmarked the day before Election Day or earlier to be tallied. That can pose a problem for people who mail their ballots at the last possible moment, especially because Washington County’s ballots generally are routed and postmarked through Las Vegas.
“I can’t control the mail,” lamented Sullivan, who won a special election in June 2023 to replace county Clerk/Auditor Susan Lewis when the Lewis moved and was no longer a county resident.
Some area residents who have expressed concerns that sending ballots to Las Vegas for processing might mean some of them don’t receive postmarks in time to comply with the deadline and therefore go uncounted.
Election officials began mailing ballots to Utahns on Tuesday.
Bad ballots, late postmarks
Recent elections indicate such fears may have merit. For example, 2,413 of the 39,061 ballots cast in the June 25, 2024, primary in Washington County were not counted due to a variety of issues. Bad mailing addresses accounted for 1,370 of the rejected ballots, and late postmarks resulted in 662 ballots that were not tallied, according to county election officials.
Nearly 1,200 late-postmarked primary ballots submitted in Washington and other counties in Utah’s 2nd Congressional District race, prompted candidate Colby Jenkins, who lost to GOP Rep. Celeste Maloy by 176 votes, to seek an order that would require county clerks to count ballots that were postmarked after the statutory deadline. His bid for legal redress ended in August, when the Utah Supreme Court rejected his argument.
As problematic as late–postmarked ballots have been, Sullivan said, he doesn’t believe the problem is worse today than it was before 2012, when the county’s mail was processed in Provo. He noted Las Vegas is closer than Provo to Washington County, which lacks the necessary equipment to process its own mail.
“We have … mailed several test envelopes from different locations at different times, and the [envelopes] all behaved exactly the way I would expect them to,” Sullivan said. “If they are sent out at the right time, they get postmarked in a timely [matter] in Las Vegas.”
Many of those that aren’t, Sullivan suspects, are the result of people mailing their ballots on Election Day, which is past the deadline. Still, that doesn’t mean county election officials are content with the status quo.
Timely tips to make votes count
For starters, they are spreading the word on social media for people voting my mail to do so as early as possible. Sullivan further notes that voters can hand-carry their ballot to the post office and request that the clerk apply the postmark. They then can ensure the date on the postmark is legible.
Even better, county officials attest, problems with late postmarks can be avoided by voting in person or bypassing the post office and depositing ballots as late as Election Day in one of the county’s 20 drop boxes, which are located at libraries, city offices and other strategic locations.
“My staff personally goes out in teams of two and picks up the [ballots in drop boxes],” Sullivan said. “I can guarantee you this 100% of the time: If you put your ballot in one of those drop boxes, it will make it to our election center” and be counted.
Sullivan also has met with the postmasters at the St. George and Hurricane post offices, both of whom have agreed to make a concerted effort to process ballots locally instead of sending them to Las Vegas. That means local postal workers will try to separate ballots from the Las Vegas-bound mail, hand-stamp them with a postmark and set them aside for county election officials to pick up.
What, me worry?
Even so, Sullivan is careful to say he is not implying that voting by mail is wrong or that the county’s election practices are flawed or insecure.
For her part, Elaine Baldwin has not worried about voting issues since she and her husband moved from San Jose, California, to Ivins four years ago.
“We ... feel much more confident in the election integrity of Washington County,” Baldwin said. “We drop our ballots off at the county box in St. George and check online to make sure that they are counted. We feel Utah’s election integrity is one of the best-managed in the country.”
Conversely, Ivins resident Christy Edwards frets about absentee ballots, saying she requested one for the June primary election and never received it. Edwards said she has been assured that she would receive one for the fall vote.
“This provides an extremely narrow time window in which to vote,” Edwards said, “especially if there is a miss in the shipment of that ballot.”
