A bill spelling out that the details of how voters return their mailed election ballots are private and making it a crime for public officials to access or use information not related to their duties is headed to the Utah House.
The House Government Operations Committee Wednesday unanimously advanced HB69 Wednesday after adopting a new version that sponsor Rep. Stephanie Gricius, R-Eagle Mountain, said adds “a code of conduct” for county clerks.
Gricius originally introduced the bill last fall, after the Deseret News reported Utah County Clerk Aaron Davidson told the Deseret News he tracked the method some politicians used to vote, including whether they followed his advice to avoid returning ballots by mail.
Davidson said then that’s how he knew one of his critics, Senate Majority Assistant Whip Mike McKell, R-Spanish Fork, returned his June primary ballot without a stamp. Gricius later described an ”unsettling" exchange with Davidson about not having used a ballot drop box.
An investigation by Utah County Attorney Jeff Gray into Davidson’s ballot tracking is ongoing.
At Wednesday’s committee hearing, Gricius said she came up with the bill during interim in response to voter information being accessed and used “for kind of political purposes with the media” but there “wasn’t time at that point to really get the bill right.”
The bill had focused on whether information was wrongfully being collected on individual or identifiable groups of voters. That’s shifted to what voter information should be protected from disclosure.
“We looked at what was already public and said, ‘OK, these things stay public.’ If it’s not listed on there, it’s private and you can’t weaponize people’s information,” Gricius told the committee. A violation is a class B misdemeanor.
The bill states that “the method by which a voter returned a mailed ballot; or whether the voter paid postage on a ballot returned by mail” are private records, unlike the accompanying list of voter history records that remain available to the public.
County clerks “cannot use someone’s voting information for political purposes or access their information without a reason that’s directly related” to their duties, Gricius said, an effort to “prevent that type of situation from happening again.”
Davidson testified before the committee that he “drew some ire” by deciding not to pay return postage on ballots last year to encourage voters to use “safe and secure” drop boxes rather than the U.S. Postal Service, which he said has “chain of custody” issues.
McKell took to social media to say that was “mostly political,” telling Utah County voters no stamp was needed to get their ballots delivered to elections officials. That sparked a back and forth with Davidson.
Wednesday, the county clerk said he was trying to save taxpayers money, but more than 21% sent their ballots back without a stamp, compared to 3% of voters in other counties that don’t pay for return postage. That cost taxpayers $10,000, he said.
But committee member Rep. Cory Maloy, R-Lehi, said that wasn’t the issue.
“It’s a code of conduct,” Maloy said, noting the ballots of “elected officials were specifically pulled to look to see how they cast their ballot, whether it was postage — with a stamp or without a stamp — drop box or not.”
Maloy asked if the ballots of most Utah County officials were scrutinized.
Davidson said he “has access to how everybody return their ballot because that’s part of my job, to make sure that they’re returned securely. I was only looking at those people that were advocating to use the U.S. Postal Service to return their ballots.”
Pressed about whether that should be concerning, Davidson said, “I would have done the same thing because it wasn’t illegal when I did it. Obviously, it wasn’t illegal because you’re now having this meeting. It’s a public record.”
Elections officials, including the state’s director of elections, Ryan Cowley, have said the state’s publicly available voter records wouldn’t specify whether or not a ballot was returned through the U.S. Postal Service.
Davis County Clerk Brian McKenzie backed the bill at Wednesday’s hearing.
“It really is a makes sense, common sense, provision,” McKenzie said.
But Marilyn Momeny of American Fork opposed the bill, saying while “there are probably some errors in judgement on an individual’s part” legislation she suggested could be seen as limiting transparency isn’t the way to correct that.
“As a citizen, that’s somewhat offensive,” she said. “I don’t think the legislative process is to settle squabbles.”
Shelly Jackson, the state’s deputy director of elections, said Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson’s office is neutral on the bill.
“We just wanted to say that we think voting records should never be politicized. And anyone who has access, whether it’s clerks, (political) parties, government officials, should be held to the same standards,” Jackson said.
She said the office, which oversees elections, is “comfortable” releasing aggregate data “but in some cases, it is weaponized against individuals.”
The day before the hearing, Davidson referred to the legislation as “the lookie-loo bill” in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
In November, Gricius explained what her bill “essentially says is you cannot do a ‘looky-loo’ at someone’s information for fun” at a hearing before the Legislature’s Government Operations Interim Committee that ended up unanimously recommending the original version.
Davidson’s Wednesday post read: “Another badge of honor; the first bill to be addressed this session by the Gov Ops committee, HB69, the lookie-loo bill. Come in person or watch online,” and included a link.
He’s been critical of lawmakers’ response to his ballot monitoring before, posting in November that they’re “worried about me revealing how a couple of public officials returned their ballots. Petty preoccupation when they could be making meaningful changes.”