Following challenges to the authenticity of the more than 28,000 signatures Gov. Spencer Cox’s reelection campaign gathered to qualify for the Republican primary election from his failed opponent, the Utah auditor found it’s “statistically likely” Cox, and others, achieved the required support to make the ballot.
Other candidates whose signatures Auditor John Dougall reviewed include U.S. Senate candidate John Curtis, who currently represents Utah’s 3rd Congressional District, and attorney general candidate Derek Brown.
“We concluded that it is statistically likely each of these candidates met the statutory threshold of required valid signatures,” Dougall wrote in a statement. “In addition, each candidate had ample time before the deadline to gather additional signatures, if requested by the signature validators.”
Dougall detailed the full audit process in a letter addressed to Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, who oversees elections in the state and is running for reelection on Cox’s ticket.
The review came after Dougall’s office said it “received many requests” to review petitions candidates used when taking the signature path to the primary ballot. Many of the questions raised, it added, were related to the validity of signatures belonging to voters who have requested to have their voter registration information protected — as state law allows.
Dougall said his office focused on analyzing a sample of protected signatures and that it reviewed over 1,200 randomly selected signatures.
“During that process, I personally reviewed each of those sampled signatures for the Cox/Henderson campaign,” Dougall wrote. “I noted 4 exceptions from our primary sample of 373 signatures.”
Exceptions include when a signature does not match the one in the state voter registration database, or when the signee is not a registered Republican.
The office then asked signature validators at the Davis County clerk’s office to verify thousands of uncounted signatures received before the submission deadline, and it audited a random sample of those, too.
“We will continue our review into other aspects of Utah’s election process, but we hope our efforts provide the electorate with greater insight into the recent signature validation process,” Dougall wrote in a statement.
An audit into the signatures coincides with a widening rift among the Utah GOP about the future of the state’s caucus-convention system. Candidates picked by caucus-elected delegates at the state convention tend to possess views that fall further to the right than Utah’s wider Republican electorate.
Calls for an audit of Cox’s signatures came largely from state Rep. Phil Lyman, who was selected at the GOP convention to be the party’s nominee for governor on the primary ballot, but lost to Cox by 8.8 percentage points, or nearly 38,000 votes in this year’s primary election.
Lyman has been raising doubts about the election since before the final ballots in that contest were cast, refusing to concede on election night and, at an earlier debate, declining to say whether he would accept election results.
He has mounted multiple legal challenges tied to the election and is now pursuing a write-in campaign for governor.