The audit, published Sept. 15, found Wasatch County has improved its process in the past two years and “generally conducts sound elections.” Still, it highlighted a handful of areas for improvement.
In a written response to the audit, Wasatch County Clerk-Auditor Joey Granger agreed that the findings were minor and said she will “strive to ensure strong and effective election controls.”
Auditors say the county failed to implement some recent changes to election requirements.
During the 2026 primary, officials correctly audited the election results before making them official but didn’t fill out all the paperwork. Some of the audit participants were untrained.
Auditors also noticed a couple of problems with chain of custody, the steps officials take so that ballots are always protected and accounted for.
The county has improved its video surveillance since the last audit in 2024, but there’s still one room where ballots are processed that doesn’t have camera monitoring. State requirements for video monitoring recently got stricter, and Granger was unaware of the change.
Election staff also did not use security seals when collecting ballots from drop boxes.
“While we did not observe staff tampering with ballots during the pick-up process, security seals increase ballot integrity and security,” the report says.
Auditors say the clerk did not meet all the reconciliation requirements. That’s the process of ensuring every valid vote is accounted for.
They found Granger published the reconciliation results after the election, instead of every time she tabulated ballots.
Wasatch County also saw one double vote by someone who cast both a mail-in ballot and an in-person ballot. Officials didn’t catch the issue because the mail-in ballots and in-person votes are processed on separate, unconnected machines.
After reviewing other counties, auditors believe this is “the only likely double vote” in the state. Granger said in her response there are not “any additional reasonable actions that could further mitigate” the risk of double voting.
Finally, the clerk’s office didn’t meet all the requirements for accepting and processing candidate nomination packets. And the county needed to have someone else review the packets for the clerk’s race, rather than staff in the clerk’s office itself, to avoid any conflicts of interest.
In her audit response plan, Granger said she’s taking steps including purchasing a new camera, adding new training and ensuring security seals are used during ballot pick-up.
However, she took issue with the auditors’ recommendations for reconciliation, saying she did all that’s required.
Granger was unavailable for additional comment Sept. 21.
She lost her bid for reelection in the June primary. Park City recorder Michelle Kellogg is the only clerk-auditor candidate on the November ballot.
A 2023 law requires Utah to audit its election system every two years. Previous audits included the whole state, but this year’s audit focused on three counties.
