After all the conflict and tension of the 2024 elections, it is time for everyone to pause and take a deep breath.
Contrary to some of our worst fears, the voting that ended Tuesday was just how democracy is supposed to work. People in large numbers, in Utah and across the nation, went to polls, or submitted their ballots by mail, and made their choices.
There was no fraud, no stuffing of ballot boxes, no wave of illegal voters, no parade of vigilantes at polling places, no active suppression of turnout, no violence or threats of violence.
The outcome of the presidential election was known before the sun rose Wednesday. There was no prolonged counting or challenged results, the kind of things that give rise to conspiracy theories about stolen elections and seriously undermine the public’s faith in their own government.
A great many Americans, and not a few Utahns, are unhappy with the way the voting turned out. But we should never forget that democracy doesn’t end on Election Day. It begins.
Citizens still have a role to play, watching their government, following the news, communicating with their representatives, working as individuals and through civic institutions to influence the actions their newly elected government takes, focusing on issues rather than personalities.
Being prepared to hold those officials to account on the next Election Day.
In Utah, the counting was a little slower than we might like, held up by long lines at some polling places.
That was particularly true in Utah County, where County Clerk Aaron Davidson has wrongly undermined our state’s otherwise popular and successful practice of voting by mail and encouraged people to vote in-person instead.
That drove a flood of voters showing up at the polls on Election Day, gumming up a system and creating a situation that Davidson and his staff weren’t equipped to handle.
Election workers at some polling places ran out of ink to print provisional ballots, holding up the process for hours. Concern that they would also run out of the approved kind of paper (they didn’t) caused Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson to dispatch an airplane to Phoenix to get more.
Henderson and Davidson continued to trade barbs the day after the election, with Davidson arguing that he handled the problem without the lieutenant governor’s involvement and Henderson reasonably pointing out that it was too close for comfort.
Those who run elections in Utah, and lawmakers who set the rules and provide the funding, should now have the attitude that they have at the North Pole the day after Christmas: It’s time to start planning for next Christmas.
While decentralizing elections is a great American tradition, allowing those closest to the people to manage the details, it may be time for Henderson, and the law, to be more aggressive with state oversight of county election planning and preparedness.
The main take-away is that mail-in voting works and should not be questioned or eroded by anyone, least of all by those in charge of running elections. The process is secure and trustworthy, leaves a fully auditable paper trail, provides voters with an online way to track whether their ballots were received and whether they were counted and avoids last-minute bottlenecks.
And nobody runs out of ink.
