I am a registered Republican living in Provo and retired from teaching college and upper- and middle-school English. I want to thank Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson a thousand times over for not bending — despite threats of prosecution — to the federal government’s demand that she turn over the unredacted private information on Utah’s voter rolls to the Department of Justice.
We desperately need more Republicans like her. The DOJ wants the rolls — which contain troves of sensitive data — to search for and remove individuals whose voter registration it concludes was obtained by fraud, yet only state election officials have the constitutionally mandated authority and hands-on expertise to make such determinations fairly and accurately.
While many may worry about election security, President Trump is taking this concern to dangerous extremes, attempting to inject executive branch initiatives into federal election law and local election practice through intimidation of state and local election officials, exploitation of voter information, legislative maneuvering and, most unfortunately, widespread lies that cast doubt on the legitimacy of our electoral processes.
I appreciate Lt. Gov. Henderson’s understanding of American democracy in which federal elections are administered by the fifty states, their counties and polling districts. State administration guarantees that votes are never subject to a single totalizing entity. Such decentralized control disperses the immense labor of officiating a federal election — and in that dispersal reduces any single actor’s power to rig or sway election results.
President Trump’s impingement on state control attacks a complex yet remarkably effective system, or set of fifty systems, and affronts the dedicated people, nationwide, who make our complex electoral process work. Lt. Gov. Henderson deserves our respect and gratitude for holding the line on one aspect of that process: state responsibility for — and control over — voter rolls and their meticulous ongoing maintenance.
Dian Saderup Monson, Provo