The Heber City Council is gathering comments from residents about what method of voting they prefer before it decides how to run the 2025 municipal election.
The city will also share information to educate voters about ranked choice voting, in case Heber decides to continue with that system for a third election.
Ranked choice voting eliminates primary elections and instead lets voters rank as many candidates as they like on their ballots. In the most recent Heber City Council election, that meant evaluating up to 11 candidates.
If no candidate secures over 50% of votes in the first round, the last-place candidate is eliminated. Anyone who listed that candidate as their top pick then has their second-choice vote tallied.
That process repeats until one candidate has a majority.
Councilmembers inquired about a citywide survey, but Heber’s communications manager, Ryan Bunnell, said there’s not enough time for that.
“A third-party, non-biased contract would be the best way for us to say that this is an unbiased result,” he said. “We don’t have time for that.”
He said he doesn’t want to use a social media survey because he’s worried people outside Heber will respond and the results might not be representative of the city’s overall population.
“It has to be auditable, because it’s sacred,” he said. “This is a sensitive topic. So, I want it to be transparent.”
Councilmember Yvonne Barney said she thought there could be value in a social media poll, nodding to the school district’s recent surveys about the new high school name and mascot.
She said she’s also concerned some voters don’t find ranked ballots intuitive.
“I hear very few people saying this is easy,” she said. “If I’m getting phone calls from little old ladies saying, ‘I don’t get this,’ and this is the second time they’ve done it, I’m not going to sit there and say, ‘Well, maybe you should go see the doctor, because you just obviously aren’t getting it.’ That’s unfair.”
Councilmember Scott Phillips, on the other hand, said he doesn’t see a need for Heber to rush to do its own survey.
The council discussed a statewide ranked choice voting study from Utah Valley University, which was used by the Park City Council in its decision to adopt the system this year.
“There’s data that’s available,” he said. “We can look at the data, and it’s unbiased, it’s from a university, it’s just stating, ‘here’s the facts. Here’s the surveys we conducted.’”
The survey showed preferences were fairly even for ranked choice versus traditional single-choice ballots.
More than 75% of UVU’s sample of Utah voters, surveyed in 2021 and 2023, found ranked choice ballots easy to use, and a majority said they enjoyed using ranked choice voting and wanted it to continue.
However, researchers said the pilot program is too new to draw definitive conclusions about voter preferences.
The Heber City Council ultimately decided not to rush into a survey of its own. Instead, councilmembers asked voters to reach out and share their opinions via email at citycouncil@heberut.gov.
The council will pick which voting method to use during its meeting April 15.
In 2018, the state implemented a ranked choice voting pilot program that runs through January 2026. A bill to extend the program died during Utah’s 2025 general session.
