On the northern edge of Utah’s west desert, where the salt-crusted dry lakebed ends and neighbors often live dozens of miles apart, Michael Moore and his family are trying to sustain a farm where they raise chickens and care for a small garden.
Once a month he takes a three-hour drive to Ogden to paint walls for extra money —as surviving has become more difficult as food and gas prices rise. How Moore marks his ballot this November will largely hinge on what he thinks will be best for the economy.
And his ballot will inevitably be cast by mail, he said, because the closest ballot drop box and in-person polling location in Box Elder County are both over two hours away.
“I probably wouldn’t vote if I had to drive that far,” Moore said.
Utah is one of eight states — six of which are in the expansive American West, where it isn’t uncommon to have to travel hours to vote — to send ballots to all active, registered voters by mail.
It is also the only red state of the bunch. And as doubts around election integrity and rumors of fraud, often without evidence, have grown in the Republican Party’s ranks in the years since it lost the White House in 2020, an increasing number of elected officials in the Beehive State have called for Utah to end, or restrict, voting by mail.
But by and large, Utahns have embraced voting by mail, an analysis by The Salt Lake Tribune found.
By sifting through public election data, scouring county websites for canvass documents and reaching out to county clerks, The Tribune collected data from all but three of Utah’s 29 counties on just how many Utahns relied on ballots that arrived in their mailboxes to participate in this year’s primary election.
Between the counties that provided data on voting methods, 96.7% of Utahns who cast a primary vote — over 400,000 people — either voted by mail or left their ballots in drop boxes.
There has previously been limited data as to the methods Utahns are using to vote. While election results match, many of the numbers posted to the state’s elections website pertaining to whether voters used by-mail ballots or voted in person contradict the data maintained by counties.
Some of that can be explained by the state not posting data for nonpartisan local elections that are open to voters of all political affiliations, like school board races, but also by how elections are run in the U.S. — they are decentralized, and their administration varies from county to county.
Among the 26 counties that The Tribune obtained data for, the lowest percentage of ballots cast through the mail or left in a drop box was 87% in Carbon County, while in one rural county, Emery, everyone used by-mail ballots to vote.
The counties with both the highest and lowest rates of by-mail ballot use were some of Utah’s most rural counties. In the state’s most populous county Salt Lake, alone, over 140,000 voters either returned ballots by mail or drop box.
In the months since the primary election, and before a consequential general election, Utah officials have ramped up rhetoric casting doubt on the integrity of by-mail elections.
The senior member of Utah’s congressional delegation, Sen. Mike Lee, in a series of posts on X last month about primary ballots not counted because they were postmarked after the deadline, asked, “Is whatever society might gain from this system worth the inherent risk of manipulation that it needlessly creates?”
A mailer sent to voters by the GOP nominee for Utah attorney general, Derek Brown, called for the creation of an “Election Integrity Task Force,” and to limit voting by mail “to those who need it.”
And earlier this year, Republican state Rep. Kera Birkeland, of Morgan, opened for the second year in a row, and then handed off, a bill that would have required Utahns to notify county clerks that they want to opt in to receiving a ballot by mail. It never made it to a vote. Birkeland said in a July social media post that she plans to revive the topic next year.
“I like mail in voting,” Birkeland wrote, “I just don’t like everyone getting a ballot that they won’t/don’t use. The people I represent want to choose which method to use and sending ballots everywhere is wasteful.”
Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, whose office oversees elections in the state, said in an interview Tuesday that there would be an “enormous cost” associated with scrapping the vote-by-mail system — “not just the fiscal impact, ... but I think another cost is in access to the ballot for individuals.”
“I think that having the ability to take the time that a voter needs to cast an informed vote, and then being able to just walk outside and stick it in their mailbox, or drive to a ballot drop box when it’s convenient for them, is really good,” Henderson said. “That convenience is, I think, incredibly important to provide access to the ballot for people.”
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson welcomes people to join her for a portrait alongside a statue of Martha Hughes Cannon as it stands outside the state Capitol for a farewell ceremony to Washington D.C., on Wednesday, May 5, 2024.
‘A much higher voter participation rate’
While Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson is the state’s chief election officer, county clerks administer elections and report their respective county’s election results.
Voter data is organized and maintained differently between counties, depending on what systems they use to manage elections. But county clerks from across the state who spoke with The Tribune said the vast majority of their constituents have come to depend on the ballots delivered to their home.
In an email, Sanpete County Clerk Linda Christensen wrote, “We do have some voters that like to vote in person but it is a very small percentage.” Joey Granger, the Wasatch County clerk, likewise said a “very small percentage” of voters there prefer in-person voting.
This year marks two decades since Utah began allowing all voters to use an absentee ballot without an excuse. In 2012, the Legislature voted to allow counties to start conducting elections entirely by mail — in part, to make it easier for more Utahns to vote.
“As you know, Utah ranks near the bottom five states in terms of voter participation, which is extremely disheartening,” Sandy Republican Rep. Steve Eliason, who sponsored the 2012 bill, told a House committee at the time.
In the preceding 2010 midterm election, just over half of registered voters in Utah — and under 37% of the state’s residents who were eligible to vote — had cast a ballot.
“And there’s been a number of ideas floated around,” Eliason continued, “and even bills to address this issue from starting with the caucus system all the way up to Election Day. It’s a well-established fact that states and other political subdivisions that vote entirely by mail have a much higher voter participation rate.”
By 2019, every county in the state had started sending ballots out to all active, registered voters by mail, and turnout has generally trended upward in the 20 years since voting by mail became a choice for every Utahn. The 2020 presidential election saw record-breaking turnout at 90.9%, and 64.2% of active, registered voters participated in the 2022 midterm election.
Any move away from vote-by-mail would likely have the opposite effect — and would cost taxpayers.
Utah County Clerk Aaron Davidson opted not to provide already-budgeted prepaid postage for this year’s primary election ballots. In the top right corner of Utah County ballots’ envelopes, where postage is usually included, a message read: “POSTAGE REQUIRED IF MAILED.”
Ahead of winning the office in 2022, Davidson was outspoken about his doubts regarding the results of the 2020 election. On his campaign website, without evidence, he wrote, “Based upon the stories I’ve been receiving from the delegate and the ballot irregularities that they have received and heard of, I would venture to say, the voter rolls are nether [sic] up to date nor accurate.”
Although Henderson said the U.S. Postal Service would deliver them without postage and bill the county, Utah County’s turnout was subsequently the lowest in the state at 43.6%.
When a group called Secure Vote Utah attempted to get an initiative on the 2022 ballot to eliminate by-mail voting, a fiscal note estimated the additional polling places and workers would cost local governments $36.8 million in one-time costs and another $19.2 million each following election.
Following the lead of former President Donald Trump after his 2020 loss, members of the Republican party started and amplified false rumors about voting by mail to explain President Joe Biden winning the White House. Some Republicans, like Gov. Spencer Cox, have said others in the GOP are erring in casting those doubts.
“We don’t win any votes by telling people that their votes don’t count,” Cox told reporters after a debate leading up to this year’s primary. “In fact, we lose votes. People think, ‘Well, why should I show up?’ when time and time again, those allegations have been proven completely unfounded.”
Likewise, if vote-by-mail were to be nixed, reductions in turnout would be felt across the political spectrum.
A Brigham Young University study published in 2020, which analyzed more than 40 million voting records in Washington and Utah, found that access to voting by mail does not benefit one party over another while it “increases turnout modestly.”
The biggest impact would likely be felt by voters who are often forgotten in policy debates — including those living in rural communities, like Moore, and voters with disabilities.
“I would certainly be concerned about the impact [rolling back vote-by-mail] would have on voters with disabilities, and how they might be more disenfranchised,” said Nate Crippes, the public affairs attorney for Utah’s Disability Law Center.
After the last presidential contest, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission found that as more people with disabilities had access to both options of voting by mail or voting in person amid the COVID-19 pandemic, fewer reported experiencing challenges voting.
“Vote-by-mail has increased access for a lot of folks in Utah, and I understand it’s not perfect, and that there needs to be changes made to ensure that it does work for everyone, but I think we’re moving more toward that, and I’d like to see us move toward making sure that voting is easy and accessible for all rather than trying to find ways to to make it harder,” Crippes said.
Instances of voter fraud are rare in Utah, auditors concluded in a 2022 review, and multiple layers of defense, like signature verification and regular verification of voter records, make it difficult. Elections officials are continually working to improve processes, and the lieutenant governor’s office agreed to make all changes suggested by auditors.
But by-mail ballots being cast outside the public eye, and passing through multiple hands when handled by the postal service, naturally make it more vulnerable to fraud. More recently, Utahns have questioned whether they can rely on the postal service to deliver their ballots on time.
After losing in the GOP primary election, congressional candidate Colby Jenkins argued that more than a thousand votes that weren’t counted because they missed the postmark deadline were disqualified because the USPS shipped them to Las Vegas for processing, causing delays.
The Washington County Clerk refuted his assertion, and the Utah Supreme Court didn’t buy Jenkins’ argument.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Michael Moore, a Utah farmer who lives in Lucin that will be affected by changes to mail-in voting, stands for a portrait in Ogden on Friday, Sept. 13, 2024.
‘It’s not really a problem in Utah’
The future of vote-by-mail in Utah could be determined in November, and whether efforts to undermine election results follow.
Moore isn’t alone in his concern for the economy this fall — a Utah Foundation poll found the top three issues for voters in the state are housing affordability, politicians listening to voters and earning enough to pay for non-housing needs.
And while Moore worries there could be fraud associated with ballots sent out in the mail, and has questions about the role they might have played in the 2020 election results, he also joins the majority of Utahns who have faith in the state’s vote-by-mail system.
About 80% of Utah voters said they were confident their by-mail ballots were counted accurately in a survey by the conservative Sutherland Institute conducted by Y2 Analytics earlier this year, and 76% said they were very confident or somewhat confident that the state’s current vote-by-mail system “produces fair election outcomes.”
Moore, leaning against his bug-speckled 4Runner at the end of a day spent wallpapering a Plain City home, shrugged and said, “I mean, it’s not really a problem in Utah.”
Update, Sept. 24, 1:35 p.m.: This story has been updated to include an interview with Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson.
