Some 1,400 Utahns who were “likely deceased” remained on the state’s voter rolls, many of them for more than a year after their deaths, and two appear to have voted in the 2023 municipal elections, according to a legislative audit released Monday.
Half the deceased voters, the audit reported, received ballots in one of the three elections reviewed.
In addition, three individuals appear to have voted twice in an election, a result of some 300 people in the system with duplicate records. The audit identified 200 instances when the same driver license number was shared by two seemingly different voters.
The report pointed out that the errors are tiny compared to the 2 million records in the state’s system.
Still, House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, used the findings to build a case for taking a hard look at the mail-in voting process that Utah has used since 2014.
“Is vote by mail really as secure as in-person voting? And based on the audits we have in front of us, it’s clearly not the case,” Schultz said. “That’s concerning to me moving forward.”
Last year, legislation was introduced to make by-mail voting an opt-in process, otherwise requiring Utahns to cast ballots in person. That bill will be back in the upcoming session.
Schultz pressed auditors on how the deceased voters slipped through.
“If you’re dead, how do you vote?” Schultz asked. “Which county was that in? That’s a crime.”
“That was in Salt Lake County,” replied auditor Jake Dinsdale.
“Did they get turned over to the [attorney general’s] office, the district attorney?” Schultz asked.
“I believe it’s currently being investigated,” Dinsdale responded.
“If you had in-person voting, can a dead person vote?” Schultz asked.
The auditor said it could be done but it would be more complicated and depend on how closely poll workers checked identification.
House Minority Leader Angela Romero, D-Salt Lake City, said mail-in voting is important to her constituents, and she doesn’t want isolated procedural issues to undermine it when it can be addressed if clerks follow the rules more carefully.
“I don’t want this to be ammunition,” Romero said, “to get rid of vote by mail and other ways we vote here in Utah.”
Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, said mail-in voting has increased participation rates but put a burden on clerks to check signatures.
“It’s also given people an opportunity to not be as forthright” and to vote for other people, he said. “Fraud has probably been a little easier with a mail-in ballot ... than to show up and show your ID. So you see pros and cons of both systems.”
Ryan Cowley, state elections director in the lieutenant governor’s office, said there are pros and cons to any election system, and in-person voting can have problems as well.
“I don’t think there’s any silver bullet,” Cowley said, “that makes the process perfect.”
Senate Majority Leader Evan Vickers, R-Cedar City, said some people want fewer people voting by making voting harder, but Utah should be pursuing a secure system but also having it accessible.
2024 Elections Audit by Robert Gehrke on Scribd
The audit stated that “ensuring that records like these are found, flagged and resolved is nevertheless a crucial part of maintaining an accurate voter list, [which] is essential to ensuring that only those who can legitimately vote cast a vote. Questions about the voter roll can lead to reduced public confidence in the election process.”
Cowley said the death notice for one of the two voters had not been uploaded into the voter registration system because the state’s vital records office hadn’t provided it, so it wasn’t flagged. The other was in the system, but a clerk determined the death record did not match the voter’s record.
He said his office would like the law changed to require vital records to provide all of the records and noted the office is taking other steps to prevent such issues in the future.
The audit is a follow-up to a 2022 review. All told, auditors made 20 recommendations to improve processes, many of them dealing with better and more structured training of Utah’s 29 county clerks who administer elections.
Schultz grilled Cowley over why “we’re still seeing some of these problems, in some cases worse than before.”
“How can the citizens have confidence that vote by mail is every bit as secure as in-person voting?” the House speaker asked.
Cowley said the issues raised were small in scope and that better clerk training might alleviate future problems. He defended the systems in place as being reasonable safeguards for elections.
The audit looked mainly at three elections — city elections in November 2023, the March 2024 presidential primary and the June 2024 state primary — and found a number of counties were not heeding the proper protocols in various parts of the process. Auditors also observed the recent general election.
Those inconsistencies ranged from not following strict steps to assure the chain of custody for ballots; ensuring that video is recorded of the entire vote-counting process, as required by state law; and complying with the postelection audit protocols.
In the case of recording the vote tallying, for example, some counties did not have enough equipment to capture the entire process and others needed merely to realign their cameras.
Auditors pointed to a recent case in Cache County — in which investigators used video evidence to charge an election official there with falsifying the dates on tests of voting machines — as examples of why the video matters. The election official accepted a plea deal to a reduced charge in that case.
“During these extensive observations and tests, we found clerks striving to run timely and accurate elections,” the audit stated. “Although there are opportunities for improvement … we have seen improvement in multiple counties and on multiple fronts. While we did not find significant fraud in Utah’s election system, the recommendations and findings in this report are needed to ensure continued election integrity.”
