In front of a room packed with Utah Republican Party leaders, many of whom voted last year to forgo a presidential primary in favor of a poll at local caucus meetings, GOP lawmakers voted to cancel a hearing on Utah’s disorderly Super Tuesday for a second time.
On Wednesday, all but one member of the Government Operations Interim Committee voted not to hear reports on Republican voters’ complaints about the chaotic caucus night and barriers to people with disabilities participating, and to delete presentation materials from the Legislature’s website.
“Kudos to the Legislature,” Utah Republican Party Chair Rob Axson said after the vote, as he and dozens of others walked out, adding that although the GOP would have been allowed to present its point of view, discussing the topic would have allowed “the officiality of a committee hearing to be used in a very biased and prejudicial way.”
The move comes a few weeks after The Salt Lake Tribune reported that party bosses pushed to have a similar agenda item dissecting caucus night problems pulled from an August meeting and a week after it reported that leaders had not responded to a review from Utah’s Disability Law Center of issues that limited access to voting.
Turnout in the presidential preference poll was ultimately tallied at 9.6% with a total of 85,797 ballots. That amounts to just under a quarter of the nearly 345,000 Republican ballots cast in the 2020 primary election, and a third of the nearly 30% turnout Democrats saw in their less competitive primary. Both were overseen by the lieutenant governor’s office and administered by county clerks.
Thousands of Utah Republicans were stuck in long lines and faced technical difficulties in March as they waited to cast their vote for former President Donald Trump or former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley. Trump beat Haley in Utah 56% to 43%.
Committee co-chair Sen. Daniel Thatcher, R-West Valley City, told his colleagues he was “truly, deeply disappointed ... that we have refused to allow them to speak.”
Other Republicans on the committee echoed Axson’s concerns when voting on a motion to nix the presentations on the presidential preference poll.
“This is a conversation that does need to happen but not in this way,” Rep. Stephanie Gricius, R-Eagle Mountain, said. “The materials have already been online. They’ve already been reviewed. It’s already tainted the conversation.”
‘All we did is try to listen’
The Government Operations Interim Committee is where questions about issues related to elections are typically raised and where lawmakers hash out whether they need to change statute before the legislative session held at the beginning of the next year.
“There is no reason for us to try and silence people who have different opinions,” Thatcher said after the meeting. “We did not have a bill before the committee. We were not going to take action. All we did is try to listen to people who wanted to be heard.”
He added, “If the elections committee in the state of Utah is not the right place for citizens to bring complaints about elections ... then where is the appropriate place for these concerns to be voiced and vetted?”
The first slated to speak was Daryl Acumen, a data analyst and former vice chair of the Utah County Republican Party, who said he sent over half a million texts and emails soliciting feedback on caucus night in the weeks after Super Tuesday. Top Republicans were wary of his presentation partly because Acumen has frequently publicly disagreed with them on whether the state should use the caucus-convention system.
Lawmakers also would have heard from representatives of the Disability Law Center, which compiled a report based on observations from a team of volunteers that evaluated the accessibility of caucus night — both Republican and Democratic — at meeting locations in eight counties.
The governor’s office has tasked the nonprofit law firm with advocating for election practices that ensure people with disabilities can vote and offering education on how to improve access. This year, the law center received more than $140,000 from the federal government toward that effort.
One of the reasons the Utah Republican Party was opposed to the hearing last month, Axson said then, was because it was not included as a presenter on the agenda. This month, the GOP and the Utah Democratic Party would have had a chance to speak.
Axson said with Acumen on the agenda, the party remained opposed to a September discussion because it “was already prejudicially biased.” He also questioned whether the Legislature has jurisdiction to hear concerns about an election run by a political party.
Acumen’s presentation, Axson alleged, was inaccurate. When asked about the inaccuracies, the party boss said, “That would take too long to really go into.”
What the numbers showed
In the 410,356 texts Acumen sent, according to his presentation, he asked recipients to rate their presidential preference poll experience on a scale of 1 to 5 — with 1 representing “angry” and 5 meaning “enthusiast” — and noted that they could reply with specific feedback. Nearly 60% of the more than 10,000 responses he received said “1.” Approximately 260 others said “zero” or “minus-one.”
The Disability Law Center, public affairs attorney Nate Crippes said, does not have a position on how the party runs its elections in the future, but added that he was “frustrated” the nonprofit couldn’t present because of all of the work that went into the review. “We just want to make sure that we’re going to have a system,” he said, “that is accessible to all.”
Axson said he never saw the organization’s report and stated the party is willing to provide accommodations to people with disabilities when asked.
Crippes said multiple party leaders approached him after the meeting to share contact information.
“We will reach out and hopefully have a conversation, which, in the end,” Crippes said, “is what we hoped to get out of this.”
Mason Hughes, a spokesperson for the Utah Democratic Party, said the party was also “really disappointed” it did not have a chance to present.
“We had a much less competitive presidential primary than the Republicans did,” Hughes said, “and we had three times the turnout rate that they did in their caucus, because we trusted trained elected officials to handle the election.”
In a statement Wednesday afternoon, Utah Democratic Party Vice Chair Oscar Mata called the move a “cover-up” and said it “reeks of corruption,” adding, “I would have told [lawmakers] that every Utahn deserves to have their vote counted by professional election officials rather than partisan leaders.”
