Utah governor says he favors improving, not eliminating mail-in voting

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

A Utah legislative audit found over 1,400 deceased voters on Utah's rolls, including two who voted in the November election.
While some Republican lawmakers question mail-in voting security, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox supports improving, not eliminating it.
Election security is expected to be a focus in the 2025 legislative session.

SALT LAKE CITY — A recent legislative audit found over 1,400 apparently deceased voters on Utah's rolls, including two who voted in the November election.

This has led to some Republican lawmakers calling into question the security of Utah's election system, with Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, using the audit to suggest that Utah's universal mail-in voting system should be revisited.

Lawmakers have already floated several suggestions related to election administration, and a bill that would require voters to opt in to receive a mailed ballot is likely to be reintroduced this year.

Schultz said he believes the audit shows "it's clearly not the case" that mail-in voting is as secure as in-person voting.

"If you're showing ID, and you're in person, it's kind of hard — unless you have fake ID — to vote if you're dead," he said.

But during Utah Gov. Spencer Cox's monthly news conference Thursday, Cox reaffirmed his support for mail-in voting.

"I don't think we need to eliminate mail-in voting, but we should always be doing more to make it more secure," Cox said. "It's important to do these audits to find flaws, and they found a couple, and we should address those."

Cox added that he doesn't want to defend Utah's election system as being perfect and that he agrees with Schultz that there are avenues for improvement.

It could become a legislative priority for the upcoming session in January, with Utah Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, echoing Schultz's concerns regarding mail-in voting.

"We pass an elections bill every year and that helps us be secure. I can tell you that back when we didn't have any mail-in voting, there were also occurrences of those types of things happening. There is no system that is perfect. We just continue to work toward perfection," Cox said.

One area of improvement he noted? Counting ballots on election night.

"It should not take us two weeks to get answers in most of our races. Now, there will always be some really, really tight races where that's the case; but for the most part, we should be able to make changes," Cox said.

That could mean moving up the mail-in deadline, allowing those ballots to be processed earlier, Cox added, saying that he'd be "very supportive of that."

"When you've got weeks (of counting ballots), 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."

Despite differing attitudes toward mail-in voting, Utah's election security is likely to be a hot-button topic during the 2025 legislative session.

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.