SALT LAKE CITY — State attorneys oppose advancing a Utah gubernatorial candidate to the primary election ballot who claims in a lawsuit that the coronavirus outbreak kept her from collecting enough voter signatures to qualify.
Republican Jan Garbett wants to stop the state from enforcing its 28,000-signature requirement and to direct the lieutenant governor’s office to put her on the June 30 primary ballot.
“Even if gathering signatures became unduly burdensome (which it did not), Utah law always gave Garbett another pathway to the ballot — one that existed long before signature gathering was first allowed in 2014. That path is seeking the party’s nomination at its convention,” the Utah Attorney General’s Office wrote in a federal court filing Thursday.
Short of being placed on the ballot, Garbett is seeking an injunction to prevent the lieutenant governor from certifying which candidates will appear on the ballot and from printing and mailing the ballots. At the same time, she wants the governor to extend the deadline for submitting signatures until four weeks after his “stay home, stay safe” directive and all local stay-at-home orders expire.
U.S. District Judge Robert Shelby scheduled a hearing in the case for Monday.
State party nominating conventions, which are being held online due the COVID-19 pandemic, will wrap up Saturday. The lieutenant governor, who oversees state elections, will certify the primary ballot Wednesday.
“With just days to go until the ballot certification deadline, Garbett seeks an order making her a primary election candidate for a political party despite her failures to gather the requisite number of nominating signatures and to attend the party’s nominating convention,” the state argued.
Garbett didn’t jump into the governor’s race until Feb. 24, about two months after candidates were allowed to start gathering signatures. She opted not to pursue the nomination at the convention, the only Republican candidate for governor to do so.
She attempted to turn in fewer signatures — an estimated 20,874 — than the number required at the April 13 deadline, so the state elections office rejected her submission.
“But for the unprecedented limitations imposed by the government in response to the coronavirus crisis, Garbett would have met the signature threshold by the deadline,” her lawsuit says.
While some candidates turned in the required signatures before Gov. Gary Herbert issued the “stay safe, stay home” directive, state attorneys note that Republican Jon Huntsman Jr. gathered thousands of signatures after the pandemic took hold and qualified for the ballot.
Making Garbett a candidate by judicial decree at this late hour though she failed to comply with all of Utah’s nominating rules increases the risk of voter confusion and disillusionment about her appearing on the ballot, creating an incentive for voters to stay away from the polls, the state contends.
Garbett claims in the lawsuit that under the present circumstances, Utah’s ballot-access requirements violate her constitutional rights.
State attorneys disagree, arguing she always had the constitutional right and ability to seek her party’s nomination through the convention.