Why Utah sent a state plane to Arizona to pick up extra ballot paper — and more ‘unnecessary’ Utah County election problems

By mid-morning on Election Day, just hours after polls opened at 7 a.m., Utah County residents had used about half of the ballots Clerk Aaron Davidson had on hand for in-person voting. It became clear the county could run out before its 13 vote centers closed at 8 p.m.

“We were quite alarmed by that,” Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson told reporters Wednesday. Her staff called clerks around the state, trying to scrounge extra paper to print ballots, but came up short.

“There just weren’t extras throughout the state. You know, the clerks, they planned. They have enough to meet their needs, and maybe a little bit more,” Henderson said, responding to a question from a reporter.

With options running out — and ballots doing the same — her office dispatched a state plane to Phoenix to collect more paper for printing ballots, she said.

“We had no idea if [Davidson] would need [the paper] or not,” she said. “And it turns out he didn’t need it, but we wouldn’t have known that until it was far too late to mitigate that problem.”

Davidson, a Republican voted into office in 2022, insists he was in communication with the lieutenant governor and tried to call off the plane. Both Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, he questioned Henderson’s reaction to what she saw as a paper shortage.

“I was at polling locations when the whole thing started,” he told The Salt Lake Tribune on Wednesday. “My staff panicked and called the lieutenant governor’s office.”

Davidson initially started the day with 10,000 ballots, which he anticipated would be more than enough after 3,300 voters in the county showed up to vote in-person for the June primary. But by the afternoon, nearly 15,000 had shown up on Election Day to vote — outnumbering his expectations and resources.

The clerk had pushed people to vote in-person, though, which he has argued is safer than mailing in ballots. While voter turnout for this year’s general election, he estimates, was about 300,000 — roughly matching the 291,159 ballots case in Utah County in 2020 — his words seem to have pushed people to polling locations.

Still, he said he was prepared for a number of contingencies. And he says he had enough paper.

The paper problem began when his office ran out of 8.5 x 14 inch sheets for balloting. They had plenty of larger 8.5 x 17 inch paper on hand though. That’s why he said he started calling around to different print shops to see if the larger sheets could be cut down. He noted the lieutenant governor’s office insisted he use a specific store.

“The printer said, ‘Yeah, we can do it in an hour,’” Davidson said. “But they sent off a plane while we were going to the printer.”

Davidson ultimately hand-delivered 30,000 pages of correctly sized paper to four polling locations in the county. And while he tried to cancel the plane once the problem seemed solved, Henderson said they weren’t willing to risk running out of ballots.

“Oh no, it went all the way. We weren’t going to turn it around,” she said about the plane. " … Much, much better to be prepared and to act quickly and to make sure that we had paper available so that the voters who showed up could vote.”

The aircraft took off from Salt Lake City at 12:46 p.m., landed in Phoenix at 2:42 p.m., and was on the ground in Arizona for less than 40 minutes before landing back in Salt Lake City at 5:21 p.m., according to flight-tracking data from FlightAware.

Gov. Spencer Cox estimated the plane trip cost taxpayers around $4,000, which aligns with legislative budget documents that indicate it costs Utah $1,156 an hour to operate such planes.

As to whether Utah County will share responsibility in covering that bill, Henderson said: “We will figure that out later.”

Davidson said he doesn’t think he should have to cover any of the cost for the plane.

“I didn’t authorize it,” he said.”It was out of their fear. It was an unfounded fear. We had a backup plan for it.”

Ink shortages, long lines and emergency ballots

Even with enough paper on hand, Utah County continued to face issues throughout election night. The printers at four polling locations ran out of magenta ink, which Davidson said is hard to find. That left Davidson’s staff scrambling to relocate printers and ink cartridges from functional voting centers and print roughly 3,000 emergency ballots as a precaution.

Meanwhile, long lines plagued nearly every voting center in the county, with some people waiting nearly three hours. Those lengthy waits were part of the reason Utah didn’t publish early returns until about 2 ½ hours after polls closed, well after national news outlets had already called the state for President-elect Donald Trump.

The lieutenant governor, whose office is charged with overseeing elections in the state, lambasted Davidson for a lack of preparedness heading into Election Day while speaking with reporters less than 12 hours after Utah began publishing election results.

One of the key responsibilities of the state’s elected county clerks is to administer voting in their respective counties. In Utah County, the second-largest in the state with hundreds of thousands of eligible voters, Davidson arranged for 13 voting centers — fewer than smaller counties, like Davis, which had 15.

Commending the county’s election workers for making sure everyone in line could cast a ballot, Henderson said, “They had some challenges — challenges that could have been mitigated. There was some lack of planning on the part of the clerk that caused some problems that were unnecessary, and we’ll be addressing that moving forward.”

“Ultimately,” Henderson added, “each county clerk is responsible for figuring out what voting should look like in their counties. They’re responsible for deciding how many vote centers to stand up. They’re responsible for deciding how much paper to stock. They’re responsible for deciding how much ink to have on hand.”

Davidson said Henderson sent him an email about the issues, but as of early Wednesday afternoon, he said he’d been too busy to read it. “I haven’t even gotten to it,” he said.

Utah County Clerk’s office has been criticized before

This isn’t the first time the lieutenant governor has been critical of how Davidson is doing his job. Her office investigated how he conducted the primary election in June.

After it found several issues, including that more ballots were cast than the number of voters who had checked in at polling locations, Utah Director of Elections Ryan Cowley said the lieutenant governor’s office would “monitor compliance” in the county on Election Day.

Davidson has also clashed with Henderson in declining to provide already budgeted prepaid postage with ballots sent through the mail during the primary election. In the top right corner of Utah County ballots’ envelopes, where postage is usually included, a message read: “POSTAGE REQUIRED IF MAILED.”

At the time, Henderson told voters that the U.S. Postal Service would still deliver ballots without postage and bill the county. Davidson said the move was an effort to save Utah County money, with most voters choosing to include a stamp and cover that cost themselves.

That decision also landed him in hot water with the Utah County attorney’s office, which is now conducting an investigation into Davidson. The clerk acknowledged that he looked up how different elected officials in the county voted when they criticized his decision on postage. The attorney is reviewing whether that violates the law. Davidson said that information is “not protected.”

But it drew ire, including from Utah County Commissioner Amelia Powers Gardner, who is also the former county clerk.

“Our citizens shouldn’t have to stand in the cold because he didn’t prepare and doesn’t have enough polling locations,” Gardner said Tuesday night. “Maybe if he spent more time preparing for the election, and doing predictive modeling, instead of playing politics with Phil Lyman, he could have been prepared for our citizens.”

Henderson in an interview said Davidson’s “failure to adequately prepare for what turned out to be a normal in-person turnout” was “shocking” to her office.

“We were not OK risking people’s constitutional rights because their clerk was unprepared,” she said.

The issue stemmed, in part, from a large number of voters casting provisional ballots, which are required to be available under the federal Help America Vote Act.

Provisional ballots are cast by voters who can prove they have moved but have not yet updated their addresses on file; those whose names do not appear in the voter file but have registered; or people who register in-person at a polling center on Election Day.

Because ballots can have different races on them — down to local legislative races or school board races — each provisional ballot has to be individually printed on site.

At the Wednesday news conference, Henderson said her office plans to work toward “streamlining” the process for using provisional ballots and same-day voter registration.

Davidson blamed same-day voter registration Tuesday for bogging things down. And he called on the Legislature to do something to modify the process.

“We don’t put election laws in place for the convenience of the clerks,” Henderson said Wednesday. “We put laws in place for the convenience of the voters to make it safer and more accessible.

In the weeks leading up to the election, Davidson distributed a letter claiming Cox and Henderson, who have since won a second term in office, did not legitimately qualify for the primary ballot. And he made unfounded claims that Henderson broke the law, calling for her to face “penalties for these violations.”

He said the letter was shared with “some of the legislators and some other individuals I know.” It was also circulated in far-right groups.

After addressing Utah County failures Wednesday, Henderson concluded she was mostly pleased with how the election ran Tuesday.

“Our clerks have been through the ringer lately. They’ve had protests, they’ve had accusations, they’ve had audits, they’ve had [open record] requests, they’ve had lawsuits,” she said. “And they’re doing incredible work. They really are. There are always going to be hiccups, but I hope that we can learn from those and use those challenges to improve the process moving forward.”