PROVO — Utah County will place its controversial “fast cast voting” system on hold for the upcoming municipal primary elections after it failed to reach an agreement with state election officials to approve the practice, Clerk Aaron Davidson announced Wednesday.
Davidson has touted the program — which allowed voters to scan their mail-in ballots into a vote counter at in-person polling places after showing identification — as more secure than mailing ballots in and relying on signatures to verify a voter’s identity. But state election officials have expressed concern with the method, which is unique to Utah County, and blamed it for discrepancies in the county vote totals, which saw 19 more ballots cast than voters who checked in at polling locations during last year’s primary election.
“Signature verification has been shown in recent legislative and state audits to be a subjective process, which is something I have raised concerns about since taking office,” Davidson said in a statement. “Fast cast voting was our innovative solution to let voters prove their identity in person and have their ballot counted without waiting in line or relying on signature verification.”
A legislative audit from late last year found some errors in validating signatures on ballot access petitions for several Republican candidates, and former state Auditor John Dougall recommended more transparency in that process.
Davidson said a recent elections overhaul by state lawmakers had the “unintended consequence” of impacting fast cast voting.
“I believe we revised the process to comply with the statutes that were changed by HB300, but ultimately, we were unable to reach agreement with the Lieutenant Governor’s Office before the primary election,” he said, referring to the municipal primary election scheduled for Aug. 12. “Rather than risk complications so close to the election, fast cast voting will be paused until further process changes can be agreed upon.”
While he signaled that the county hopes to reimplement the program in the future, he said residents can use mail-in voting or traditional in-person voting for the upcoming election.
“Under Clerk Davidson’s fast cast voting last year, more votes were cast than voters who had a record of voting,” said Elections Director Ryan Cowley. “County clerks are free to implement any programs in their counties as long as they are in compliance with the law.”
A report from the state elections office last year said: “In order for the ‘fast cast’ tabulators to read by-mail ballots, a key security feature must be disabled. Disabling this would allow for any ballot to be read, creating the potential for multiple ballots to be scanned in by a single voter.”
“We don’t know for a fact that those were fraudulent, but we can’t prove that they weren’t,” deputy elections director Shelly Jackson told KSL last year.
That same report also found that Davidson’s office had an unusually high rate of rejecting signatures on mailed ballots, more than five times higher than the same rate during the 2023 municipal elections.