On Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024, Davis County Clerk Brian McKenzie posed for a photo in a ballot processing center at the Davis County Administrative Building in Farmington. Editor’s note: This story is part of We Vote Utah, a partnership between KUER, PBS Utah and Utah News Dispatch to cover Utah’s 2026 elections. Ballots will start hitting Utahns’ mailboxes this week ahead of the contentious midterm elections, marking another year when a national spotlight has been cast on voting by mail – largely due to President Donald Trump’s ongoing rhetoric of widespread fraud without evidence.
Utah clerks on both sides of the political aisle, frustrated by national discourse that’s not based in fact but has cast a shadow over voting by mail, are pushing back. Grand County Clerk/Auditor Gabe Woytek, who is unaffiliated, told KUER in an interview for the station’s State Street episode that aired Monday, “The general rhetoric, I’m very tired of it because it continues. There continues to persist a rhetoric that threatens the idea that it’s safe and secure, when I know in practice that it is a very safe and secure system … and we continue to add in those safeguards. Yet the conspiracy and the discontent continues to persist.”
In Utah, voting by mail has a long history. Since 2018, when nearly all of Utah’s counties started running elections primarily by mail while also allowing in-person voting options, the system has been lauded by state leaders, Republicans and Democrats alike. But in recent years, as Trump has continued raising doubts about its security, Utah’s GOP-controlled Legislature has reacted. Lawmakers have enacted more ID requirements and slowly pulled back on universal, automatic voting by mail by requiring voters to opt in to continue receiving their ballots in the mail by 2029.
Meanwhile, the federal debate rages on. Although Utah’s own top election official, Republican Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, has been ardently opposed to it, the state’s senior GOP Sen. Mike Lee continues to push the SAVE Act that would demand voters prove their citizenship in order to cast a ballot. And Trump, through an executive order, has tried to change how the U.S. Postal Services processes by-mail ballots. That rule would require states to send voter information to the federal government while also banning the Postal Service from delivering or collecting mail-in ballots from people who haven’t been confirmed as eligible voters.
Had Trump’s Postal Service executive order not been blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court for this year’s election, Henderson, a Republican, has said it would have been an “unmitigated disaster,” since it would have been logistically impossible for clerks to adhere to it with such a short timeframe before the Nov. 3 election.
To highlight allegations of voter fraud and to make the case for Trump’s Postal Service rule, the Trump administration last month spotlighted federal charges against a former Utah letter carrier accused of throwing 300 primary ballots into a dumpster before they could be delivered to Eagle Mountain voters’ mailboxes. In an interview with law enforcement, the ex-letter carrier indicated he did not have a political motive but said he threw away the mail, which also included advertisements, “because he wanted to ‘lighten his workload’ so he could presumably go home earlier,” prosecutors said in charging documents.
The tossed ballots are unusual. Even so, 300 ballots make up a fraction of Utah’s more than 2 million registered voters, and the charges don’t indicate a concerted fraud effort. And multiple recent state audits, while they’ve found some areas of improvement, have concluded that Utah’s election system contains “no significant fraud.”
