Utah’s popular vote-by-mail election system was again this year a target for the state’s supermajority Republican House of Representatives. After GOP colleagues in the Senate rejected their bill, representatives in the final days of the legislative session pushed for — and won — a taxpayer-funded study on “the security of ... voting by mail.”
The Legislature will give $100,000 for researchers at Utah Valley University to compare the trustworthiness of sending a ballot through the mail to casting it in person. They are also tasked with identifying “the best practices for conducting and implementing a process where identification must be presented before depositing a ballot in a ballot drop box.”
That measure replaced the text for HB311, a bill that previously would have made largely technical changes to election laws. The version of the bill lawmakers published and passed Thursday night sets a deadline for the university’s Herbert Institute for Public Policy and Center for Constitutional Studies to complete and share their work with the Government Operations Interim Committee at or before its October meeting.
“This is a kind of compromise,” Sen. Mike McKell, R-Spanish Fork, told his colleagues on the Senate floor. “We’ve been working with the House to come up with some type of study. We had some other election bills that were logistically challenging, so we’re going study the issue.”
Two days prior, McKell successfully blocked Rep. Jefferson Burton’s, R-Salem, Election Code Modifications, or HB479, which would have further restricted voting by mail. Last year, Burton introduced a bill that will eventually end Utah’s practice of sending a ballot to every active, registered voter’s mailbox.
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.