We applaud Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson for forcefully defending the state’s voting laws against the meddlesome, domineering arm of Washington.
And we are confused by the Trump administration’s desire to create a central voter registration list, complete with sensitive personal information. Surely, the administration understands the need for federalism, or states’ rights. Elections and election security in the United States belong to states, not Washington, regardless of which political party is in power.
Utahns want to vote by mail
Also, the administration’s antipathy toward mail-in voting is misplaced. A poll last year by the Deseret News and the Hinckley Institute of Politics, conducted by HarrisX, found 50% of Utahns preferring mail-in voting to be the default voting method, with only 30% preferring to have to opt in to receive ballots in the mail. Only 11% said they do not want to allow any voting by mail. States should be allowed to adopt voting systems they prefer, so long as those systems are fair and secure.
Utah adopted vote-by-mail in part to encourage voter participation, and that has been a rousing success. The Utah Foundation, an independent research group, said Utah went from 44th in the nation in terms of voter turnout to 13th in 2018. “This is likely due in part to Utah’s expansion of vote-by-mail,” a Foundation report said.
In the 2012 presidential election, before mail-in voting, turnout in Utah was 56.1% of eligible voters. In the 2020 election it jumped to 69.2%, according to Ballotpedia. It remained high at 64.2% in 2024.
When it comes to voter security in the United States, one number is important to know — 3,144. That’s the total number of counties and county equivalents in the states. For the most part, each of these handles its own reckoning and totaling of ballots cast in each election. This disparate system makes widespread voter fraud much more difficult to orchestrate than would a centralized, national vote counting system. In Utah, these tallies are aided by computers that are not connected to the internet.
The second important number to remember is 51, the number of states plus the District of Columbia. Each of these has its own laws governing elections and voter registration rolls. States keep these databases and are responsible for updating and ensuring their integrity.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a Trump administration plan to have the Postal Service screen mailed-in ballots and not deliver them to people whose names were not on a federal register of citizens. Following the ruling, Henderson tweeted, “As expected, the United States Supreme Court has upheld the injunction blocking the USPS mail ballot rule. Utahns can have confidence that the 2026 election will proceed as normal.”
The American election system is run by governments that are closest to the people, ensuring accountability. In Utah, the lieutenant governor has primary responsibility for elections, and voters get to elect that office every four years.
The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department sent a letter to Henderson recently, letting her know she is the subject of an investigation for refusing to provide Washington with full voter lists. Such a denial, it alleges, is against the law.
Voter lists are indeed public, but personal information such as driver license and Social Security numbers are not.
Henderson, who is a Republican, has taken what traditionally has been a classic Republican stance against federal incursions into Utah’s autonomy. Her office has responded to the administration’s threats by asserting “neither state nor federal law entitles the Department of Justice to collect private information on law-abiding citizens.” Both Gov. Spencer Cox and former Gov. Gary Herbert have supported and praised her position.
On X, Cox posted, “It’s wrong for the DOJ to investigate or threaten the lieutenant governor for carrying out her responsibilities under Utah law.”
Utah’s election integrity
The White House is right to be concerned about election integrity, but Utah has done a stellar job of tracking its voter registration lists. An audit of voter rolls last June found 27 registered voters were confirmed noncitizens, with another 25 marked as likely noncitizens.
Considering the state has more than 2 million registered voters, that is a 99.7% success rate. At worst, the number of noncitizens would not be enough to change the outcome of any recent election.
The audit found another 5,007 voters whose citizenship could not be identified. Henderson told KSL many of these likely registered years ago before they were required to attest to their citizenship. They will be asked to update their registrations with the appropriate identifications.
The audit revealed other weaknesses in the system that Henderson said would be corrected. It found a glitch in the online program that allowed people to check a box attesting they were citizens despite a driver license showing otherwise. Officials said this glitch has been fixed.
Other problems seemed to be a result of human error and the use of paper forms to register. Henderson has promised to provide additional training on how to prevent these problems. Election oversight, on the state level, works.
Any program administered by humans is going to experience some problems. Utah’s voting system, however, has exhibited an extraordinarily clean system, certainly one that ought to be free from federal threat.