Questions about the future of mail-in voting in Utah have come up legislative session after legislative session in the four years since the last U.S. presidential election.
Should voters have to opt in to receive a ballot in the mail? Or should the state end the practice entirely?
The proposals from Utah’s supermajority Republican Legislature stem from former President Donald Trump’s 2020 electoral loss and lies about voter fraud spread in an effort to explain and undermine those results. Utah is one of eight states to mail ballots to all active, registered voters, and the only red state to do so.
State Rep. Kera Birkeland, R-Morgan, opened (then handed off) a bill this year that would have required Utahns to notify county clerks that they want to opt in to receiving a ballot by mail earlier. After the bill never made it to a vote, Birkeland said in a July social media post that she plans to revive the topic next year.
[READ: What would happen to elections if Utah stopped sending ballots by mail?]
So how many Utah voters would be impacted by such a law? And are Utahns actually using those mail-in ballots to cast a vote?
The Tribune reached out to the Utah lieutenant governor’s office, which oversees elections in the state, in January to ask if it had data available as to how many voters sent ballots in the mail or left them in drop boxes during the 2020 and 2022 general elections, versus how many voted in person.
A spokesperson asked a Tribune reporter to submit a public records request, and while the data contained in the response detailed how many votes each candidate got across the state, only a few counties reported how they received those votes.
After the state’s primary election in June, reporters noticed that the reports counties submitted to the state grouped results by voting method: “By Mail Ballot,” “In Person” and “Provisional.”
Where counties had voting methods posted on their websites, or in canvassing documents linked on their websites, The Tribune pulled data from those. When it was not immediately able to locate that, either, it reached out individually to county clerks.
Ultimately, The Tribune was able to collect data from 26 of Utah’s 29 counties, with Garfield, Morgan and Piute counties being the exceptions. Of the votes cast in those counties, 96.7% — more than 400,000 — came on the ballots Utahns received in the mail.
