Hey, Utahns, you need to turn in your votes! And county clerks, you’re behind your 2020 pace in counting them!
That’s my big takeaway after looking at the state’s mail-in-voting data with under two weeks to go until Election Day.
Utah, of course, continues to embrace voting by mail. Through the lieutenant governor’s office, the state also has data available for political campaigns and media, telling them which voters have already submitted their ballots, though, to be clear, not for whom they voted. This information is compiled by each county clerk, though different counties count their votes at different rates. Ideally, campaigns then can save money and not waste mailers or texts on those who already have sent in their ballots.
We usually can use this data, too, to get a wider idea of the trends in the voting. How many people are sending in ballots early, compared to earlier elections? Which counties already have processed more of their ballots? Which parties have been more strongly represented in the early vote-by-mail process?
This year, however, there’s a snag.
I expected lower voting numbers than when I last looked at the issue in 2020 (with a presidential race topping the ticket). But I didn’t expect this big of a gap. Back in 2020, when I examined the state’s data from 13 days before the election, I found that 310,000 Utahns had sent in their ballots and had them processed by their counties. This year, 116,000 have done the same.
What’s going on? It’s probably some combination of:
• It’s a midterm election, not a presidential one, which always reduces voting. For example, 1.06 million Utahns voted in the 2018 election, while 1.48 million voted in 2020.
Even so, Utahns don’t typically have a high-profile, competitive Senate race on a midterm ballot, either. And in the 2018 midterm election, more Utahns had turned in their mail-in ballots by now.
TargetSmart, a consulting company, has tracked Utah early voting over the past three even-year elections. (https://targetearly.targetsmart.com/g2022?state=UT&view_type=state)
• Some Utahns have probably decided not to cast a mail-in ballot this year, with certain loud voices scaring them away from that process and convincing them that it’s more likely to lead to fraudulent results. (There’s no evidence of this allegation.)
• The biggest factor, I believe, is some counties have yet to process any ballots, which wasn’t the case at this time in 2020. Some counties are clearly processing them more slowly.
As of this writing, Iron, Juab and Wasatch counties have processed zero ballots, according to filings with the lieutenant governor’s office. Salt Lake County is also way behind its 2020 pace: then, they it 23% of registered voters processed already, now, it’s at just 3%.
These wild swings mean that I feel like it’s pretty impossible to try to even read the tea leaves on who has voted so far. In the 2020 version of this article, with just under two weeks until Election Day, we were able to compare how Republicans and Democrats had different turn-in habits for their ballots: Democrats were more likely to get them in quickly, whereas Republicans waited until closer to Election Day. We even went precinct by precinct to see how votes had shifted.
This year, though? We still have that data, but just so much less of it, and so scattered in processing, that I don’t think we could come to any valid conclusions or any guesses as to what it all means. For example, here is TargetSmart’s breakdown of the voters’ parties in this year’s election.
TargetSmart, a consulting company, has tracked Utah early voting over the past three even-year elections. (https://targetearly.targetsmart.com/g2022?state=UT&view_type=state)
It’s pretty easy to explain this: Democrat-rich Salt Lake County hasn’t counted many votes yet. It’s not an enthusiasm gap; it’s a data issue.
Obviously, all of the ballots getting counted at the end is the most important goal here. But it would be nice to see year-to-year consistency in how the process is run.
We’ll obviously keep you updated on this as the clock winds down until Election Day. Until then, if you do see anyone making predictions based on the early mail-in vote in Utah, don’t just take their conclusions with a grain of salt — you can probably just throw them in the garbage.
Andy Larsen is a data columnist for The Salt Lake Tribune. You can reach him at alarsen@sltrib.com.
Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.
