Utah lawmakers are planning significant election reforms in the upcoming legislative session after the roller coaster ride of the 2024 election cycle.

Utah’s primary process and mail-in voting system came under fire following the defeat of the 2024 campaigns, which criticized the confidentiality of candidate signature packets, the subjectivity of signature verification, and the uncertainty of relying on the U.S. Postal Service to return ballots.

After implementing numerous election safeguards in recent years, from mandatory audits to cleaned voter rolls, state lawmakers are looking to take a deep dive into Utah’s 2025 elections to improve the process and maintain trust.

Independent electoral office

Perhaps the greatest of these reforms would be a return to 50 years ago.

In February, state Rep. Ryan Wilcox, R-Ogden, introduced a bill that would overhaul Utah’s election oversight, creating a new executive agency to manage elections independent of the lieutenant governor’s office, similar to Utah’s secretary of state model until the creation of the position of lieutenant governor in 1976.

The invoice, HB490would require Utah’s elected officials – the governor, lieutenant governor, treasurer, auditor and attorney general – as well as the speaker of the House of Legislatures and the president of the Senate, to appoint the director of a new state elections office.

In a statement to the Deseret News, Wilcox said he would introduce a similar bill in 2025 to ensure “the independence of the elections office from the lieutenant governor’s office, as is done in 48 other states.”

Utah and Alaska are the only States in the country where the role of chief election official is carried out by the lieutenant governor. In 33 states, the chief election official is elected. In other states, the chief elections official is appointed by the governor, the state legislature, or a board or commission.

Wilcox said the bill was held up in 2024 for 2025 as part of an agreement with Utah Gov. Spencer Cox to continue working on it between sessions.

“We have made significant progress in the meantime and I look forward to discussing the issue with my colleagues, stakeholders and the public in the months to come,” Wilcox said.

Rep. Trevor Lee, R-Layton, said allegations of conflicts of interest in this year’s gubernatorial election motivated lawmakers to hand election oversight to “someone who simply didn’t no part in the game as far as the election is concerned.”

“We saw everything we needed to make sure that this will happen and be a priority for our body this year,” Lee said.

Register to vote by mail

Several state lawmakers, including Lee, also want to disrupt the state’s default mail-in voting status.

Lee plans to introduce a bill that would change state code so that only registered voters who request an absentee ballot would receive one — as opposed to all registered voters automatically receiving one. The change would keep mail-in voting as an option for everyone who wants it, but would “clean up the voter rolls in one fell swoop,” Lee said, for voters who have moved or died.

Under the bill, voters could choose to receive future absentee ballots by checking a box on their absentee ballot in the next election cycle, Lee said.

In a conversation with county clerks, Rep. Kera Birkeland, R-Morgan, also opened a file for a bill that would limit the number of voters automatically receiving an absentee ballot to those who voted during of the last two or four elections. mail, she said.

Vote by mail… in person

This year’s extremely close 2nd Congressional District Republican primary has highlighted concerns about some mail-in ballots being rejected by county clerks due to a late postmark from the U.S. Postal Service, although whether they were mailed one or more days before the deadline.

Birkeland said she has heard of several bills addressing concerns about postmark deadlines. Rep. Jordan Teuscher, R-South Jordan, said he’s heard the same thing but isn’t sure there’s a great solution other than better publicity about the delays inherent in using the postal service rather than at county drop boxes.

Gayle Ruzicka, president of the Eagle Forum, which leads one of the the biggest Conservative lobbying organizations in Utah said the ‘only safe way to vote’ requires a complete change in how mail-in ballots are returned to eliminate reliance on post offices and signature verification, which are more susceptible to human error.

Ruzicka believes mail-in ballots should go through a voter identification process like traditional in-person voting. His team will push for reforms that would still allow ballots to be sent to voters by mail, but would require voters to return their ballots in person at an official polling place where they would be required to present a valid government ID.

“No one should be able to vote if they can’t prove they are who they say they are,” Ruzicka said.

Convention-primary compromise

The Utah Eagle Forum is also pushing for a secretary of state bill that strengthens the caucus-convention system and bills to increase transparency in collecting candidate signatures to qualify for office. primary elections. Signatures found in so-called candidate packets should be subject to the same transparency expectations as citizen ballot initiatives, which are made public online by the lieutenant governor’s office, Ruzicka said.

Sen. Todd Weiler, R-Woods Cross, expects increased transparency to be a major theme in the “dozens of bills” the state House will send to the Senate this year. This is probably a topic where consensus could be reached, Weiler believes.

“We treat signature packets for referendums differently than candidates who go the signature route,” Weiler said. “I don’t know if that makes sense.”

If Ruzicka had her way, the 10-year-old state law providing a signature-gathering path to primary qualification, known as SB54, would simply be repealed, leaving party nominations entirely to a group of a few thousand state delegates to party conventions. .

But there is a way to reverse the declining relevance of the party convention while still maintaining primary elections open to all party members, according to Teuscher.

The bill, which passed the House 2023 but never received a vote in the Senate, would allow candidates who receive a dominant share of support among state convention delegates — on the order of 70 to 80 percent — to eliminate all opponents in primaries and to go directly to the general election ballot, even if there were others. qualified candidates for a primary through the collection of signatures.

This would encourage candidate and voter participation in the state’s unique caucus-convention system, while preventing non-consensus candidates from securing the party nomination, according to Teuscher. The proposal would also allow candidates who can’t afford to play in the state’s emerging signature-gathering business and avoid costly primary races that produce the same outcome as the convention, Teuscher said.

Easier main access

Taylor Morgan, executive director of Count My Vote, the group largely responsible for the state’s primary signature pathway, thinks there’s another way to diminish the influence of expensive signature-gathering companies and keep the door open to candidates of all stripes. qualify for the primary.

Count My Vote’s current priorities, in discussions with state legislators, are to lower the threshold for collecting signatures for primary qualification, to allow registered voters to sign multiple nomination packets for their party in the same race and increase the flexibility of campaigns to collect signatures. on paper and through a new national app that scans driver’s license barcodes to verify digital signatures.

These changes would make primary qualifications more accessible to more candidates and remove some of the pressure on campaigns to collect signatures as quickly as possible to avoid overlap with competing candidates, Morgan said. Despite the focus on increasing voter turnout statewide, Morgan said Count My Vote is open to compromise with the state Republican Party if it shows a willingness to make its voting system more inclusive caucus-convention.

“Voters like the dual track,” Morgan said. “We therefore expect the party to take some steps before wanting to further strengthen its process which is clearly broken.”

Amid rumors that state lawmakers would trade the “dual track” for a non-convention primary track, Cox told reporters earlier this year that he would not support eliminating the state’s single caucus-convention system. State.