Two controversial election reform bills crammed into one committee hearing — one that would effectively end the universal option to vote by mail in Utah and another removing the state from an organization meant to enable voter roll cleanup — passed Tuesday amid concerns from local elections officials and voting rights groups.
The most consequential of the bills, HB300 from Rep. Jefferson Burton, R-Salem, would require that ballots mailed to voters be returned in person unless voters apply in person ahead of the election to submit their vote through the mail.
It also would implement more strict voter identification laws, mandating voters show their ID when placing their ballots in drop boxes, which two poll workers would watch. The drop boxes would be open from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekdays.
Voting rights groups warn that if the bill becomes law, it would put in place significant hurdles for Utahns to participate in elections — especially for those who are low-income or who have disabilities.
While some Republicans expressed reservations about the bill, it passed out of the House Government Operations Committee after a mostly party-line vote. Centerville Republican Rep. Paul Cutler broke from his party to oppose the bill.
The bill still has to clear the full bodies of both the House and the Senate. If signed into law, the changes would first be implemented for municipal elections held in November.
(Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Rep. Jefferson Burton, R-Salem, listens to proceedings, during the committee meeting on HB 285, at the Capitol, on Friday, Jan. 26, 2024.
“It will not be a presidential election, and it will be a good time to rehearse this and practice it moving forward, to make sure that we can overcome any of those obstacles that we may have,” Burton told the committee.
That remark drew criticism from the Utah League of Cities and Towns, whose Deputy Director Justin Lee said he worried that it would drastically reduce turnout rates for municipal elections, which already suffer from low turnout while municipalities have limited access to funds for voter outreach.
Speaking on behalf of the county clerks who administer the state’s elections, Davis County Clerk Brian McKenzie said his counterparts across the state have concerns with how the legislation could impact voters, as well as the logistics and cost of implementing the bill.
“I confess that it is costly,” Burton told committee members. Significantly more poll workers would have to be hired to administer elections and more drop boxes would have to be placed throughout the state, and county governments would largely shoulder those expenses.
According to a fiscal note attached to the bill, counties would immediately have to spend about half a million dollars to execute its changes and around an additional $6 million per election.
The lieutenant governor’s office, which oversees elections in Utah, would have to pay nearly $300,000 up front, then $20,000 annually. Burton said to educate voters, the state would also likely have to set aside additional money for a public awareness campaign — similar to a multimillion dollar campaign against federal control of public lands the Legislature approved last year.
No evidence of systemic fraud
The bills’ sponsors say that they were triggered, in part, by a legislative audit of Utah’s 2024 election that found two “likely deceased” Utahns voted in 2023 municipal elections and three people seemingly voted twice. Those ballots were cast while about 1,400 “likely deceased” voters reportedly remained on various counties’ rolls, and about 300 people had duplicate voting records around the state.
However, auditors also concluded that there was no evidence of significant fraud in Utah’s elections and told lawmakers the errors represented a minuscule portion of the state’s 2 million-voter system.
According to a 2024 survey commissioned by the conservative Sutherland Institute, which opposes the current version of the bill, 56% of Utah voters are very confident, and 31% are somewhat confident, that ballots in Utah are counted accurately. The poll found eliminating the option to vote by mail would reduce that confidence.
Lawmakers initially gave permission to voters to use by-mail ballots without an excuse two decades ago, and allowed counties to conduct elections entirely by mail in 2012. In debates at the time, legislators said they hoped moving toward a universal vote-by-mail system would raise low voter turnout.
An investigation by The Salt Lake Tribune found that in 26 of Utah’s 29 counties that provided voting method data, 96.7% of voters used the ballot they received in the mail to participate in last year’s primary elections.
Ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, the House majority launched a blitz campaign to promote the bill — posting it repeatedly across social platforms, along with clips of Burton and House Speaker Mike Schultz discussing the legislation. The senior member of Utah’s federal delegation, Sen. Mike Lee, posted on his personal X account, “I wholeheartedly support Utah House Speaker Schultz in his effort to ensure that every vote is valid and that are [sic] ballots are secure.”
Libs of TikTok — an influential social media account in right-wing media, often accused of hate speech — posted a photo of Burton and a screenshot of the bill, urging, “If you’re a Utah resident, call your local representative and make sure they support this.”
As the bill advances, Senate leaders have told reporters they plan to bring forward an alternative proposal.
“We want as many people to vote as possible without cheating,” Senate Majority Assistant Whip Mike McKell said. “We want a safe, secure process. There is overwhelming support for mail-in voting, there’s also overwhelming support to have verification — and I don’t think those are opposite.”
‘Let’s not take a tool that works away’
A second bill that has drawn the ire of elections officials would end the state’s membership in the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center, more commonly known as ERIC. The organization is widely seen as the only tool that reliably helps states clear the names of the deceased and nonresidents from voter rolls, with member states sharing voter registration and motor vehicle department data.
The bill, HB332 from House Majority Whip Karianne Lisonbee, would place Utah in a class of Republican states that have left ERIC in recent years amid conspiracy theories and frustrations that it doesn’t capture all of the names that need to be removed from rolls.
It passed out of the committee after a 10-3 vote, with one Republican and two Democrats voting against the bill.
Lisonbee’s legislation would give the lieutenant governor’s office the option to enter into a data-sharing agreement with another third party for assistance in cleaning voter rolls, but there is not currently an alternative that has yielded reliable results.
“Let’s not take a tool that works away, even if it’s imperfect,” Weber County Clerk Ricky Hatch told committee members, adding that he and other county clerks would be “all in” if a program is developed that works better than ERIC.
According to a December 2023 infographic published by the lieutenant governor’s office, in the decade Utah has been a member of ERIC, the organization has helped the state review 675,000 voter records and remove over a quarter of a million names of people who had moved out of state that would have remained on rolls otherwise.
Membership in the organization costs about $50,000 a year. Lisonbee’s bill does not yet have a fiscal note, and it’s unclear how much would have to be budgeted for another option.
The bill does not limit the state from contracting with a private company to scour voters’ data and requires that a third-party database go beyond the records ERIC uses, to include property tax records, vital records and Medicaid application records.
In an interview with The Tribune last fall, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson said she would “absolutely not” support efforts to leave ERIC.
“I don’t know why we would want to withdraw from the only tool that we have to find out when people are registered in another state,” Henderson said.
But lawmakers didn’t have a chance to hear where the lieutenant governor stands on the bill — when Rep. Sahara Hayes, D-Salt Lake City, asked that a representative from Hendeson’s office offer their perspective, Burton, who also chaired the committee, refused to allow it because the public comment period had ended.
“The lieutenant governor — in the bill and in existing code — and the clerks have access to vital statistics and records, and they’re required within 31 days to clean up voter rolls for dead people. So there’s no excuse for having 1,400 deceased individuals on our voter rolls at the time of this audit,” Lisonbee said before the vote on her bill, adding, “There’s lots of options for the lieutenant governor to clean up our voter rolls.”
