Blanding • Blanding resident Davina Smith made Utah history late last year when she declared her candidacy for the Utah House of Representatives, making her the first Navajo (Diné) woman to run for a seat in the state legislature.
But Smith said the latest turn of events in the campaign — a residency challenge filed against her by her opponent — is nothing new for San Juan County, where Native Americans have long alleged a trend of political suppression.
Rep. Phil Lyman (R-Blanding), who currently represents Utah House District 73 in southeast Utah, emailed the Lieutenant Governor’s office on March 9, challenging Smith’s residency status. Lyman submitted two screenshots to Utah Director of Elections Ryan Cowley, according to emails reviewed by The Salt Lake Tribune.
“This is a formal complaint regarding what I believe may be a violation of the residency requirement to run for Utah Legislature,” Lyman wrote. “... above are just a few screenshots that make me question her residency.”
The images included Smith’s Facebook profile and a website called SignalHire that showed her role as CEO of Haseya Native Initiatives LLC, Smith’s advocacy and engagement organization that works with tribal communities and was first incorporated in Salt Lake City in 2019.
State election officials denied Lyman’s challenge two days later, after contacting Smith and determining she met the residency requirements in her district. Smith presented a personal car insurance policy, bank statements, pay stubs from her employer and other documentation as evidence.
Utah code requires candidates for the legislature to establish residency in the district where they are running six months prior to the candidate filing deadline, which was on March 4.
In a statement, Smith said she lives in Blanding, grew up in San Juan County and that her umbilical cord is buried in Utah soil in Monument Valley where she announced her campaign in December.
“I was frustrated when Phil made a baseless allegation about my residency to the Lieutenant Governor’s office,” Smith said. “Blanding is a small town and all Phil needed to do was knock on my front door and talk to me. Instead, he turned to a state official in Salt Lake City in a baseless attempt to invalidate my candidacy.”
Smith went on to point out similarities to past residency challenges in the region. “Using political trickery to deny Native people equal opportunities to vote and run for office is, sadly, a standard practice in San Juan County’s history,” she said.
San Juan Commissioner Willie Grayeyes, a Democrat and member of the Navajo Nation, faced a residency challenge by two of his Republican opponents in 2018.
Wendy Black, who was then seeking the Republican nomination to run against Grayeyes in the race, alleged he was not a resident of Utah, sparking an investigation by the county clerk and sheriff’s department.
Grayeyes was briefly removed from the ballot before a federal court determined the clerk’s office had improperly backdated documents related to the challenge.
Kelly Laws beat Black in the Republican primary, but after he lost the commission election to Grayeyes, Laws sued — again challenging Grayeyes’ residency status. A district court judge later sided with Grayeyes, determining he was a Utah resident under the law, and the Utah Supreme Court upheld the decision.
Two candidates for county office, both members of the Navajo Nation, won a similar court case in 1972, Smith said, after a judge determined the clerk had intentionally falsified candidate filing requirements.
Given this historical context, Smith called Lyman’s recent action “déjà vu of the worst kind.”
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Rep. Phil Lyman, R-Blanding, walks through the House of Representatives at the 2021 legislative session at the Capitol in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2021.
Contacted by phone Tuesday, Lyman said the complaint “was not necessarily even a challenge” and that he received “information that was misleading” from the Lieutenant Governor’s office about residency requirements.
Lyman said he reached out to Smith after he filed his formal complaint and that he supports the state’s decision to deny it.
“It’s their job to make sure that candidates are qualified,” Lyman said. “I wasn’t trying to disqualify her. I was trying to make sure that the rules were applicable across the board. I don’t know where she lives.”
The district where Lyman and Smith are running had its boundaries adjusted after the 2020 Census. District 69 now includes all of San Juan, Grand, Kane, Garfield and Wayne counties as well as parts of Emery County.
Smith said Lyman’s challenge took time away from her campaign as she worked to gather documents.
The district is still majority Republican, but the Utah Democratic Party believes the recent addition of Moab and Grand County — the only reliably blue county in rural Utah — helps shift the race in Smith’s favor. Smith outraised Lyman in 2021, according to financial disclosures.
Grand County Commissioner Mary McGann, a Democrat and Smith supporter, called Lyman’s challenge “racist” and compared it to false claims that former President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States.
“It’s shocking that they’re using the same strategy that they used with Willie Grayeyes,” McGann said. “They wouldn’t be doing that if she was white.”
In a phone interview, Smith said she was living in Salt Lake City when she first formed Haseya Native Initiatives in 2019 and the online sources that Lyman used as evidence were out of date. Publicly available documents filed with the Utah Department of Commerce in January list the company’s address in Blanding.
“We both live in Blanding,” Smith said. “I was like, oh my goodness, you’re literally going to look at my Facebook page?”
“The people of District 69 don’t need more political trickery, they need results,” she said. “They deserve an honest campaign with both candidates putting their best ideas forward. You’ll see me on the trail doing exactly that, talking about my ideas to move our district forward.”
Zak Podmore is a Report for America corps member and writes about conflict and change in San Juan County for The Salt Lake Tribune. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by clicking here.
