For years, the percentage of residents who voted for city leaders in Kamas, the 2,000-person town dubbed “gateway to the Uintas,” was in the single digits. But when Summit County began to conduct its elections entirely by mail in 2017, researchers at Brigham Young University found that participation in Kamas’ elections shot up from 9% to 52%.
That was a common pattern in cities and towns, according to a report compiled last year, which concluded that receiving and having the ability to return ballots through the mail increased turnout in municipal contests throughout Utah by roughly 10 percentage points.
Vote by mail as Utahns know it, however, could cease to exist after this year’s legislative session.
While lawmakers are weighing a slate of election reforms, the most consequential of the bunch is HB300 from Rep. Jefferson Burton, R-Salem. It 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.
The bill is currently on hold, and will likely change as it moves through the legislative process, but it’s unclear the extent to which Utah’s universal vote-by-mail system will be preserved. If the bill is signed into law as it is currently drafted, the changes would first be implemented during local elections held this November.
“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 House Government Operations Committee earlier this month before members voted to advance the bill to the full House of Representatives.
The deputy director for the Utah League of Cities and Towns, Justin Lee, took issue with that remark, saying, “Our elections are very real on the municipal level.”
Lee, who used to be the state elections director and helped implement Utah’s vote-by-mail system, said he worried that the bill would drastically reduce turnout rates for municipal elections. He noted that approximately 94% of municipalities saw an increase in turnout since their county began sending ballots in the mail.
BYU’s research indicates that when all residents have the ability to vote by mail, it doesn’t just drive up turnout in rural localities, but Utah’s most densely populated cities, too.
When Salt Lake County began using vote by mail, turnout in Salt Lake City’s elections grew from 10% to 38%. In Provo, the practice increased turnout from 17% to 36%.
“We want to make sure that everything that we look at here — from the line management, to the drop boxes, to the [ballot signature] verification — doesn’t take away from that increase we’ve seen at our level,” Lee said, adding that he foresees it being difficult for localities to procure additional funding for voter outreach.
Michael Barber, a political science professor at BYU who worked with student Asia Lynne Reid to analyze municipal turnout, said voters typically fall into one of three categories — “always voters, never voters and sometimes voters.”
“In municipal elections,” Barber said, “[sometimes voters] probably just aren’t even aware that an election is happening. If they’re not sent a ballot, they don’t vote.” When “sometimes voters” in rural areas have to drive long distances to return their ballot, that also decreases the likelihood that they will participate in elections, Barber added.
“I’m not aware of any other policy — and political scientists have studied every possible policy to increase turnout — that’s had such a big effect,” Barber said.
