Utah’s Republican lieutenant governor has strong words for candidates and their supporters who don’t accept election results.
An attack on elections and the people who run them, Deidre Henderson said, is an attack on liberty and free government.
“‘Heads I win, tails you cheated’ is not a foundational principle of a free government,” she told reporters on Thursday.
It’s been a tumultuous election year for Henderson, and elections officials all over the state, who have reported a rise in threats and misinformation. The FBI is currently investigating an envelope containing white powder that was addressed to the Lt. Governor’s Office last month, and Henderson has for months faced accusations that she meddled in the state’s primary election.
She’s been called “traitorous,” “corrupt” and a closeted Democrat on social media. Her recent decision to not endorse Donald Trump for president, as first reported by The Salt Lake Tribune, has brought a new wave of criticism. Henderson said her office and county officials around the state now have personal protective equipment in case they find suspicious or threatening packages.
Those attacks, Henderson said, are symptoms of a broader distrust in elections and election officials. And as Nov. 5 nears, that rhetoric will intensify, she warned.
Voters will hear claims of rigged elections and corrupt judges; reporters will press candidates on whether they’ll accept the election results; politicians and pundits will argue voting by mail or machine is less accurate; it could take several days, maybe weeks, for some results to be clear; irregularities may arise, not because of a vast conspiracy, but because of human error.
“During the last four years there has been more violence and disruption aimed at our political institutions than we have seen in decades. And while we expect these destructive efforts to continue, we have learned a lot in the past four years and are prepared for it,” Henderson said. “I want to make sure you are prepared too.”
Speaking to a room full of students, reporters, government officials and staff with the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics on Thursday, Henderson leveled criticism at her own party for sowing distrust in elections and, in her own words, focusing on the outcome, rather than the process.
“If the outcome is something that they don’t like, they’re going to question everything,” she said.
Henderson described a sentiment that has slowly built among some Republicans, starting in 2016 and reaching a new peak in 2020, where a fringe group of “election vigilantes” are now considered mainstream.
“Both parties are guilty of this. I do understand that it is much more prevalent among one party right now, in unprecedented ways, so I don’t want you to think I don’t recognize that. I do,” Henderson said, describing a “certain candidate’s” effort to “lay out the case for losing before the election.”
Much of the rhetoric Henderson was referring to can be seen in the Trump wing of the Republican Party. That includes state Rep. Phil Lyman, a Blanding Republican who lost his primary bid for governor and has since tried, unsuccessfully, to argue that Gov. Spencer Cox cheated his way onto the ballot and that Henderson, in her role as lieutenant governor, is hiding evidence. Lyman is now running a write-in campaign for governor.
But despite her criticism, Henderson didn’t mention any candidates or politicians by name. When asked whether she was talking about Lyman, or Utah County Clerk Aaron Davidson, who have both said voting by mail is less safe, Henderson said she was referring to “anyone who makes those claims.”
Just several hours after Thursday’s conference, Lyman took to social media with a message he has often repeated: “The primary election results cannot be verified because Cox and Henderson demand that county clerks withhold basic elections records…Spencer Cox and Deidre Henderson are corrupt, illegitimate candidates.”
Although Utah is home to some moderate, less Trump-aligned candidates — for instance, outgoing Republican Sen. Mitt Romney — Henderson said the narrative around “stolen” elections and voter fraud is just as prevalent here as in other states, with Utah candidates endorsing that narrative. That’s problematic, she told reporters.
“We’ve seen this snowball over the past few years in a way that, like I mentioned, was easy to think it was fringe. And now I see it gaining traction. And that’s what worries me. I worry that we’ve reached the tipping point. I worry that it’s become normal to believe lies, and abnormal to believe truth,” she said.
Read the full report at UtahNewsDispatch.com.
