Utah Republican policymakers are focused on voter confidence ahead of the 2025 legislative session following an election year that highlighted intraparty division over ballot access and mail-in ballots.
Among top legislators and lobbyists there is a general understanding that the state’s 10-year-old primary process, known as SB54, which permits primary qualification via state convention or signature-gathering, will remain in place.
But key players have opposite ideas on how to increase trust in this unique election system.
House Speaker Mike Schultz and House majority leadership told the Deseret News on Tuesday they support legislation that would require voters to show their ID in-person when they return their ballots, although ballots would still be mailed out.
They said that eliminating reliance on signature verification, ballot curing and the U.S. Postal Service will remove reasons of concern for voters and candidates in close races.
Election reform activists Stan Lockhart and Taylor Morgan, as well as the father of SB54, former Sen. Curt Bramble, suggested at a Sutherland Institute event on Wednesday that they support lowering the signature threshold for primary qualification.
Former Sen. Curt Bramble, R-Provo, talks to members of the media at the 2025 election policy discussion hosted by the Sutherland Institute at the Thomas S. Monson Center in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News
This would reduce the role of big money and signature-gathering firms in Utah GOP primaries while keeping elections accessible to the greatest number of Utahns possible, they argued.
The disagreement between these two approaches is whether the state should prioritize restricting how people vote to maximize security, or prioritize increasing ballot access to maximize voter participation.
What Utah voters say would increase their trust
A new poll presented by the Sutherland Institute at Wednesday’s election policy event found strong trust in Utah elections and identified several ways lawmakers could strengthen trust more.
The poll, conducted by Y2 Analytics, surveyed nearly 1,000 registered Utah voters shortly before and after the 2024 general election. It found that 54% of respondents were “very confident” that their ballot would be, or had been, counted accurately and 29% who were “somewhat confident.”
Utahns overall confidence rose from 83% to 87% when asked to rate their confidence in ballot accuracy at the state level.
“To us, what this said is, there isn’t really a big crisis of confidence in elections, at least when you go out to talk to average voters themselves,” said Derek Monson, the chief growth officer at Sutherland Institute, a conservative think tank.
Sutherland Institute chief growth officer Derek Monson moderates a discussion with Brian McKenzie, Davis County clerk, and Amelia Powers Gardner, Utah County commissioner, about the security of Utah’s election system during the 2025 election policy discussion hosted by the Sutherland Institute at the Thomas S. Monson Center in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News
But a significant number of voters believe that policy choices being discussed this year could increase or decrease their confidence in elections, according to the poll.
The proposal that produced the greatest net gain in election confidence is requiring photo ID when voting by mail.
Over half, 51%, of voters surveyed said this change would make them either much more or somewhat more confident in Utah elections and 20% said it would make them less confident for a total of 31 percentage points in “net confidence.”
Other changes that produced a net gain in confidence were requiring mail-in ballots to be received by Election Day, with 21 points in net confidence; ensuring that election results are known on election night, at 18 points; and requiring election officials to send voters the results of election audits, at five points.
The poll found that the policy change that produced the greatest net decrease in confidence in election results was requiring voters to cast ballots only on Election Day — 60% of respondents said this change would make them less confident, 19% said it would make them more confident for a total of negative 41 percentage points in net confidence.
Other confidence-decreasing measures include using artificial intelligence to help election officials verify voter signatures, requiring all voters to cast ballots at an in-person polling station on Election Day, and transferring election oversight away from the Lieutenant Governor’s Office.
Sutherland Institute chief growth officer Derek Monson moderates a discussion with Brian McKenzie, Davis County clerk, and Amelia Powers Gardner, Utah County commissioner, about the security of Utah’s election system during the 2025 election policy discussion hosted by the Sutherland Institute at the Thomas S. Monson Center in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News
Vote-by-mail … in-person?
Despite a constant drumbeat from GOP state delegates to repeal SB54, undoing Utah’s dual-path to primary qualification is not on House Republicans’ “priority list,” according Schultz, R-Hooper.
But the caucus will still be pursuing reforms in response to complaints from losing candidates in the 2024 election cycle over the non-transparency of signature nomination packets, the unreliability of Postal Service postmarks and the subjectivity of ballot signature verification.
The state House Republican leadership team says they have a bill to eliminate these latter two complaints.
Under the proposal, Utah voters would continue to receive mail-in ballots a few weeks before Election Day. But, in order to submit them, voters would be required to travel to an in-person polling location during an early voting period and present a form of identification.
This would maintain the convenience for voters who like to research candidates with their ballot at home or who like the flexibility of voting before Election Day.
But it would also eliminate the opportunity for people to forge signatures on ballots, take the pressure off the Postal Service to meet election deadlines and remove the burden from county clerks of counting late breaking votes after Election Day and reaching out to voters to correct mismatched signatures.
“We’re not against the vote by mail overall, we just think there’s a better way to do it,” Schultz told the Deseret News and KSL editorial boards on Tuesday, pointing to a Pew poll from January 2024 that found 81% of U.S. adults supported requiring people to show government-issued photo identification to vote.
Schultz’ determination to reform vote-by-mail is the direct product of multiple legislative audits that have taken place since he passed a bill requiring them in 2022, he said.
One audit, released in October, found that over 4% of signatures used for primary qualifications were incorrectly counted or rejected. Another one, released in December, identified inaccurate voter rolls and a lack of statutory compliance by some county clerks.
Another major impetus for reforming vote by mail, according to Schultz and Majority Whip Karianne Lisonbee, R-Clearfield, was the extremely close 2nd Congressional District GOP primary where several hundred ballots were rejected with a late postmark at least in part because of Postal Service delays.
If all it takes to avoid uncertainty surrounding which votes will be counted is changing how mail-in ballots are returned, then the changes will be well worth the Legislature’s time, according to Majority Assistant Whip Casey Snyder, R-Paradise.
“The strength of our institutions and the strength of our elections is contingent upon people having total confidence in that,” Snyder said. “If there’s any way that we can improve that confidence and show people that there’s no question here, the better off we’re all going to be as a system.”
Raise or remove ballot obstacles?
Davis County Clerk Brian McKenzie and Utah County Commissioner Amelia Powers Gardner, who formerly served as Utah County Clerk, said the Legislature will want to be careful about blending mail-in ballots with in-person requirements.
Amelia Powers Gardner, Utah County commissioner, talks about the security of Utah’s election system during the 2025 election policy discussion hosted by the Sutherland Institute at the Thomas S. Monson Center in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025. Brian McKenzie, Davis County clerk, listens. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News
County clerks would need an enormous amount of resources to staff in-person polling locations for 10-14 days prior to Election Day if all Utah voters are instructed to submit their mail-in ballots in-person, McKenzie said.
“It is a significant change for the voters, it is a significant cost impact as well for the taxpayers, and before we make any of those significant changes like that, we really need to make sure that this policy is data-driven and not perception-driven,” McKenzie said.
Brian McKenzie, Davis County clerk, talks about the security of Utah’s election system during the 2025 election policy discussion hosted by the Sutherland Institute at the Thomas S. Monson Center in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025. | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News
Swapping signature verification for in-person voter identification could potentially introduce even more human error into the process, Powers Gardner said.
When she oversaw elections in Utah County, Powers Gardner oversaw a fast-cast voting pilot project that allowed voters to quickly drop off their mail-in ballots in-person.
Powers Gardner said the experiment resulted in a greater number of individuals casting multiple ballots than other processes because of a lack of safeguards in the check-in and scanning steps that exist for other ballots submitted via the mail.
House Democratic Whip Jennifer Dailey-Provost told the Deseret News that one of the minority caucus’ greatest concerns is that their Republican colleagues will capitalize on imperfections in the vote-by-mail process to limit who can conveniently vote.
“We have to be committed to making sure that everybody has the very best opportunity to vote, and any moves to curtail that availability is just anti democratic,” Dailey-Provost, D-Salt Lake City, said.
On Wednesday, the key players who were involved in negotiating the state’s compromise on primary elections agreed that the best next step for the election system is to give voters more candidate choices, not fewer ways to vote.
Bramble said an unintended consequence of SB54 was to create “a cottage industry for paying for signatures” to get on the primary ballot, which has divided the GOP and benefitted candidates with lots of money.
Bramble agreed with Morgan, the executive director of Count My Vote, and Lockhart, a board member at Fair Vote, that the best way to improve the state’s election system and increase trust is to lower the signature threshold to qualify for primary elections.
One bill made public on Tuesday would reduce the signature threshold for statewide primary races from 28,000 signatures to just 1,000. This would broaden the number of choices available to voters and increase their ability to select the candidate who best represents their values, Bramble said.
“We shouldn’t fear the voice of the people,” Bramble said.