False claims of election fraud followed Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson into office after their 2024 reelection, primarily spread by members of their party.
Now lawmakers, predominantly Republicans, want to take election oversight away from the lieutenant governor. They’re advancing a proposal to amend the Utah Constitution to give that role to a newly created and independently elected secretary of state.
“We have a bit of an inherent distrust of elections, no matter if the actors are good — and they are," Rep. Lisa Shepherd, R-Provo, told the House Government Operations Committee on Tuesday.
“My bill,” she continued, “has nothing to do with the people that are currently in there, or people in the past. Mine is strictly about structure. It’s not about personalities, parties, politics or people.”
She added that she didn’t want Utah’s elected lieutenant governor to be tainted by the “muck of elections and the controversy that surrounds it.”The new secretary of state would also be elected under Shepherd’s legislation, although it provides that the lieutenant governor would make decisions for races in which the secretary of state is a candidate. The committee gave near-unanimous approval to proposed amendment HJR25 and the accompanying HB529, with one Democrat voting against it.
Read Emily Anderson Stern's full story at sltrib.com.
This article is published through the Utah News Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations in Utah that aims to inform readers across the state.