As he pushed for voters to pay for their own postage for mail-in ballots, Utah County Clerk Aaron Davidson reportedly checked whether multiple state lawmakers placed stamps on their ballots. Now lawmakers are moving toward ensuring such actions are treated as a crime.
A week before Election Day, Davidson told the Deseret News that he had tracked how multiple elected officials — at least, “those that have politicized the stamp/no stamp to make it an issue,” he later said — cast their ballot. Among them were Sen. Mike McKell, R-Spanish Fork, and Rep. Stephanie Gricius, R-Eagle Mountain.
“What this bill essentially says is you cannot do a looky-loo at someone’s [voting] information for fun,” Gricius said. “If you don’t have a specific election-related purpose, then you can’t just look up specific individuals.”
Without any debate, members of the Utah Legislature’s Government Operations Interim Committee voted unanimously to give her bill its stamp of approval. Lawmakers will consider whether to make it law during the 2025 legislative session.
If passed, it would be a class B misdemeanor to “access or disclose certain information relating to the method and timing of a voter casting a vote or returning a ballot.” In Utah, that means up to six months in jail.
Davidson, who oversees elections in the second-most populous county in the state, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Last month, he told The Salt Lake Tribune that he believed voters had a right to politicians’ voting information because, when McKell sent his ballot in the mail without postage, he was doing “a disservice to his tax-paying constituents, making them pay for his convenience of not finding a ballot box to return his ballot.”
McKell had submitted paperwork to make his voter information private, which is allowed under state law. Because Davidson accessed it anyway, the senator referred the issue to the Utah County attorney, who is now investigating the clerk’s actions.
The Utah Constitution protects voters’ right to a secret ballot.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Rep. Stephanie Gricius in a committee meeting at the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023. Gricius, whose ballot the Utah County clerk reportedly accessed, put forward a bill to make that a crime.
Questioning the security of ballots cast through the mail, Davidson opted not to provide already-budgeted prepaid postage in this year’s elections. In the top right corner of Utah County ballots’ envelopes, where postage is usually included, a message read: “POSTAGE REQUIRED IF MAILED.”
Utah County saw the lowest turnout in the state during the June primaries. Although state officials said the USPS would deliver ballots without postage and bill the county, Utah County’s turnout among active, registered voters was 43.6%.
“I would argue that without getting our elections right, nothing else we do matters,” the committee’s chair, Sen. Daniel Thatcher, of West Valley City, said before the vote. “Whether for a noble crusading idea, or whether out of malice or spite, is irrelevant — the idea that someone could access that protected, sacred right to vote and weaponize it against opponents or enemies, real or perceived, is unthinkable.”
An American Fork resident who said she was a part-time election worker in 2022 and 2023, Marilyn Momeny, told lawmakers she supports the bill and that Davidson’s actions are “concerning.”
“It didn’t even occur to me to look people up and see whether they mailed in their ballot or voted in a voting center,” Momeny said. “One would hope all election workers and anyone who has the data has that kind of discretion, but obviously some people have different judgments about what they should keep private and what they shouldn’t.”
Questions about whether it was appropriate — or legal — to access elected officials’ ballots is one among a litany of problems state and local officials have raised about how Davidson does his job.
Utah County voters braved lines, some nearly three hours long, to cast a ballot on Election Day. Some polling locations temporarily ran out of paper and ink to print ballots. Voting delays in the county were part of the reason Utah didn’t publish the first of its ballot returns until about 2 1/2 hours after polls closed that night and national outlets had already called a number of the state’s races.
Davidson, who ran for clerk in 2022 on a platform that questioned the integrity of the 2020 presidential election, penned a letter in October that was circulated among far-right groups calling for Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson — Utah’s top elections official — to face prosecution for unfounded claims that she mishandled the process by which candidates qualify for the primary ballot.
