Candidates should have multiple paths to the ballot, Utah voters say

On the heels of the 2024 gubernatorial election that included Republican Phil Lyman appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court to have Gov. Spencer Cox thrown out of office for gathering signatures to get on the ballot, a vast majority of Utahns — including Republicans — still support having the signature option.

According to a new poll conducted by Noble Predictive Insights for the group Count My Vote, which was instrumental in the creation of the signature path, less than one in eight Utahns want delegates at party conventions to have the sole power to nominate primary election candidates.

The poll found that 26% of Utahns, meanwhile, only want candidates to qualify for the ballot by gathering signatures and 44% prefer the current system, in which candidates can choose the party convention or signature gathering.

Among Republicans, the results were similar, with 44% favoring the hybrid, dual-track system while only 17% want to require GOP candidates to be chosen exclusively by the party’s nominating convention.

“This is a clear verdict: Keeping the current system (where signatures are an option) or going to signature-only are BOTH more popular than a convention-only option,” the pollster wrote in a memo summarizing the results, “

Noble surveyed 609 registered Utah voters from March 11-13. The margin of error is 3.7 percentage points.

There was more than double the support for getting rid of the nominating convention and going the signature-only route, the poll found, as there was for ditching signatures and using solely the convention. Still, the strongest support was for the existing hybrid system, which 44% of surveyed voters support.

Since 2014, with the passage of SB54, candidates seeking office in Utah have the option of either seeking the party’s nomination by winning at least 60% support from delegates, gathering a requisite number of signatures — 28,000 for statewide office, 7,000 for congressional seats — or both.

But the signature path was the focal point of considerable controversy over the past year.

In addition to Lyman’s claims that he should have been the Republican nominee — despite state law to the contrary — because he won about two-thirds of the GOP convention vote, two separate audits called into question the subjectiveness of the signature verification process.

The Legislative Auditor General reviewed signatures gathered by three statewide candidates who qualified for the primary because they gathered signatures — Sen. John Curtis, Attorney General Derek Brown and Cox — and identified signatures that were counted but did not sufficiently match the signatures on file. The error rates identified were 1.3% for Brown, 1.7% for Curtis and 2.4% for Cox.

All three candidates also had signatures that were incorrectly invalidated and should have been counted, according to the auditor.

A similar analysis by Utah’s state auditor found an error rate of just over 1% in Cox’s signature packets.

But because the signatures were verified and candidates still had time to gather more signatures, the election outcome stood.

Additionally, earlier this month, 11 individuals who were being paid based on how many signatures they gathered were charged with falsifying signatures. The fraudulent signatures were flagged during the county clerk’s verification process, turned details over to prosecutors and none of the signatures were counted in the candidates’ totals.

Conservative Republicans have clamored for doing away with the signature option, and Lyman is running for Republican Party chair this year in part on a platform of fighting to repeal SB54. But no Republican lawmakers sponsored legislation this session to undo the SB54 hybrid model.

Two bills during this legislative session will impact the signature process.

Sen. Wayne Harper’s SB164 lets poll watchers witness the signature verification process, requires an audit of the signature verification and requires clerks to look at additional signatures beyond the target in order to provide a buffer. Another, SB53 from Sen. Calvin Musselman, R-West Haven, lets voters remove their names from candidate petitions.