- Cox suggested moving up the mail-in ballot deadline so 95% of votes can be counted by 11 p.m. on election night.
- Utah was one of the slowest states in counting the 2024 general election results.
- Cox defending Utah's dual pathways to primary qualification, saying that SB54 actually protects the caucus-convention system.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox called for electoral reforms to speed up election-night results in the Beehive State.
During his monthly press conference on Thursday, Cox reiterated his support for Utah’s vote-by-mail system but said an area that needs major improvements is how fast vote totals are updated following the election.
Cox recommended potentially moving up the deadline when voters are able to submit a mail-in ballot postmarked by the U.S. Postal Service.
This would give county clerks more time to conduct signature verification of these ballots before polls close, potentially leading to more people voting in person on Election Day and the state counting 95% of its ballots by 10 or 11 p.m. on election night, according to Cox.
“I think that would would help everyone have more faith in the election system because what happens inevitably is when you’ve got weeks, people start to doubt, Why is it taking so long?” Cox said. “And even though there are great answers for that, it makes it really easy for chaos agents to come in and make up conspiracy theories about why it’s taking so long.”
What improvements are needed to Utah elections?
Utah was one of the slowest states in the nation to count 2024 general election results, with the state’s universal vote-by-mail system creating lags because of late-arriving ballots, the huge amount of signature-verification required and the need to reach out to voters about mismatched signatures.
The delay caused many news outlets around the country to claim prematurely that Utah was one of two states in the nation that decreased its support for President-elect Donald Trump compared to 2020.
Over the course of the nearly three-week canvass period following the election, both Trump and write-in gubernatorial candidate Phil Lyman improved their vote share in the state by over 5 percentage points.
In response to two recently conducted legislative audits, Cox seconded some of House Speaker Mike Schultz’s criticisms of the election system.
One audit, released by the state’s Legislative Audit Subcommittee, found an error rate of roughly 2% in the signature verification process that qualifies candidates for the primary ballot.
Another, released in December, found 1,400 deceased voters still on Utah voter rolls and identified areas where county clerks failed to meet election security standards.
Upon reviewing the audits, Schultz, R-Hooper, claimed they showed that vote by mail could never be as secure as in-person voting because the signature verification process is subjective and burdensome on election workers.
Some lawmakers have proposed a compromise between those who want to maintain the convenience of vote by mail with the security of in-person voting by still allowing ballots to be sent to voters via the mail but requiring voters to return their ballot in person at an official polling location where they would be asked to present a valid government ID.
Cox emphasized that election security concerns have always existed, including before the state adopted vote by mail, and that Utah lawmakers pass election security bills every year to improve safety and accuracy of the process. But he said that shouldn’t stop public officials from rethinking how voting by mail occurs.
“I do think we can limit the scope of mail-in voting in a way that adds trust to the system and and makes it easier for clerks to administer,” Cox said.
To address concerns surrounding long lines for in-person voting in places like Utah County, Cox said the state should consider streamlining the same-day voter registration process. He also criticized a particular unnamed county clerk who Cox said had not prepared for the election by buying enough paper and ink.
Cox affirms support for SB54
Cox repeated his view that the state’s primary elections law, known as SB54, should not be repealed. The decade old law created a signature qualification to the primary ballot circumventing state party conventions.
Since its passage, SB54 has remained a favorite punching bag of conservative Utahns who say it allows moderate Republicans to buy their way to the nomination by skipping over the highly engaged party delegates.
Cox said many Utahns need to be reminded that SB54 was a compromise that saved the state’s unique caucus-convention system against a ballot initiative that would have removed it completely. Cox has said he values the caucus process and would not support its elimination — a point he repeated on Thursday.
Cox directly responded to one complaint surrounding SB54 that related to his own primary qualification this year. He said that SB54 currently prohibits election officials from making the entire signature list public, unlike citizen ballot initiatives which are published online. Cox said he supports making that law more transparent “so that those signature lists can be released.”
But at the end of the day, Cox said his commanding win in the primary election among all Utah Republicans, as well as that of Sen.-elect John Curtis and Utah Attorney General-elect Derek Brown, who also lost at state convention, shows that “Republicans in the state were not the same as the delegates and saw things very differently.”