Election Ballots in Summit and Wasatch County should arrive in mailboxesFriday and Saturday. KPCW was sent a screen shot of a Face Book news feed that shows additional postage may be required when submitting a ballot by mail. Carolyn Murray has this report.
County Clerk, Kent Jones said Summit County ballots do not require additional postage. He said the post office assured them that one 49 cent stamp would be adequate.
"From what we’ve talked with the post office, there is not postage, extra postage needed on our ballot. My guess is that maybe Salt Lake County or somebody that has a larger ballot that “may have went to a second page or you know they have a longer ballot. It may have put them over so that extra postage is required. Bur, our ballots in Summit County should go with a normal postage.”
Jones said if the ballot turned into two 17-inch pages rather than the current one page, there could be an increase in the required postage.
“I would never say never. It depends on the length of the ballot. And in a year if you have a lot of judges, if you have a lot of propositions, if you have a lot of bond questions, you know, it depends on the length of the ballot. Now our ballot is a 17-inch ballot but it’s on front and back. So, it’s still only one page.”
Jones said there may be a couple of Utah Counties that pay return postage on mail-in ballots. He said Summit County has not done that so far.
“If there’s a time that we’re required to pay postage or if the County Council says they want to do that, then we’d have to budget for it. I’d have to include another $50,000-dollars in my budget. You have drop boxes all over the county so they can be dropped off, they can be brought here, they can be mailed. So, two years ago, we sent out 24,000 ballots and we had over 21,000 of them come back.”
Wasatch County Clerk, Brent Titcomb said the regular 49 cent letter postage is all that’s needed to mail in ballots in their county.
Go to Summit County.org or Wasatch.utah.gov under the elections tab to see a sample ballot and learn about drop box location. and to website under the elections tab to find out where drop boxes