New poll: Three-quarters of Utah voters confident in vote by mail system

Three-quarters of Utah voters trust that mail-in ballots are safe and accurate, according to a new Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll conducted by HarrisX.

Just a few weeks away from the 2024 general election, 75% of Utahns who were polled said they are confident that votes cast by mail in Utah are counted as voters intended. The poll found 35% of Utahns are very confident, 39% are somewhat confident, 16% are not very confident and 9% are not at all confident in the state’s vote-by-mail system.

Trust remains high across the political spectrum, particularly among Democrats: 92% of self-identified Democratic respondents said they were confident in votes cast by mail, including 63% who said they were “very confident.”

Voter confidence fell to 72% among Republicans and independents or members of third parties. Self-identified Republican and independents’ confidence in election integrity increased by 10 percentage points when asked about in-person voting.

The partisan breakdown becomes more stark in relation to federal election outcomes. While 82% of Utah Republicans, 84% of independents and 91% of Democrats expressed confidence in the validity of state and local election results, just 59% of Republicans and 58% of independents expressed confidence in presidential election results, compared to 91% of Democrats.

The poll was conducted by HarrisX between Oct. 15-19 among 813 registered Utah voters and has a margin of error of +/- 3.4 percentage points.

A ‘mature’ system

Utah voters’ high trust in their election system is a function of positive views toward local government and an awareness of the state’s careful implementation of vote-by-mail policies over the course of multiple decades, according Ryan Cowley, the director of elections at the Lieutenant Governor’s Office.

“The more familiar people are with processes, the more trust they have in them,” Cowley told the Deseret News.

Unlike many states which hastily adopted mail-in ballot practices after the onset of COVID-19, Utah has fine tuned its vote-by-mail system over the course of 30 years, Cowley said. Beginning in the 1990s, some “remote” Utah counties began experimenting with voting by mail. Between 2013 and 2018, many counties made the same shift before it went statewide in 2020.

This gradual process allowed the state’s policies to “grow into” a vote-by-mail system, Cowley said, and led to Utah having a “mature” process compared to some other states. Having a ballot arrive at voters’ homes allows them to take time to research candidates and issues, Cowley said, adding that he doesn’t see any tradeoffs between the convenience of mail-in ballots and election security.

In Utah’s vote-by-mail system, voter ID is confirmed at the front end of the process before ballots are delivered, Cowley explained. And while not perfect, the signature verification process used to prevent voter fraud has proven to be at least as accurate and effective as alternatives, he said.

To increase confidence in Utah’s vote-by-mail system, Cowley recommends that voters track their ballot at vote.utah.gov to get notifications at each step of the ballot-counting process. If voters have concerns about this process, Cowley doesn’t want them to take his word for it. He invites them to go to their local county clerk’s office to observe ballot processing, which has already begun and which is open to the public.

Suggested reforms

This year’s 2nd Congressional District Republican primary highlighted some points of concern with Utah’s primarily vote-by-mail election system.

Some ballots were discarded by county clerks after receiving a late postmark stamp from the U.S. Postal Service at its Las Vegas area distribution center despite the ballots having allegedly been placed in the mail one or more days before the deadline.

Greg Powers, a political consultant who worked as campaign manager for the losing 2nd District candidate Colby Jenkins, said he believes the flaw in Utah’s electoral system is that it relies on the postal service which is not prepared to handle votes with the equal care that citizens are entitled to under the U.S. Constitution.

“In a close race now instead of the voters deciding it, the election falls to whoever just got lucky and had fewer errors with the post office that were against them,” Powers told the Deseret News.

Following a recount and multiple lawsuits, Jenkins lost the 2nd District GOP primary to Rep. Celeste Maloy by just 176 votes. Over 1,000 ballots were rejected in the district’s population centers of Iron County and Washington County because of late postmarks from the Postal Service.

The results of the new Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll would be vastly different if respondents were presented with some of the complications voters faced in this year’s 2nd District race, Powers said.

While Powers prefers same-day, in-person, paper-ballot voting, he said Utah’s vote-by-mail system can avoid most of the problems of the 2nd District race by moving away from returning ballots through USPS. To do this, the state should invest in more drop boxes in every municipality and implement a system where a government-issued ID must be scanned for every ballot that is submitted to the drop box, Powers suggested.

A survey of 27 Utah counties conducted by Weber County clerk Ricky Hatch found that around 97% of Utah voters took advantage of the state’s vote-by-mail system in the June primary election, with 41% of votes cast via USPS, 56% cast via secure drop box and 3% cast in person.

A focus on rhetoric

The findings of the new Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll are similar to those presented by Utah’s Sutherland Institute think tank in May. Derek Monson, the author of Sutherland Institute’s policy report on vote by mail, said these consistent poll results reveal that Utah voters are not being influenced by national rhetoric surrounding election integrity.

“Attacks on our systems, or attempts to undermine them, calls to not accept results, those kinds of things, or to just attack the security of vote by mail, those messages don’t seem to be penetrating down to voters,” Monson told the Deseret News.

This is “100% due to Utah doing it the right way,” according to Monson. Since its widespread adoption, there has been not a single validated instance of large scale voter fraud in Utah’s vote by mail system, Monson said, pointing to an election fraud database compiled by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which opposes vote by mail.

There is always room for improvement in any process, Monson said. But these conversations must be based on the overwhelming evidence that Utah’s vote by mail system is working and that we can “take it from good to great,” as opposed to beginning with the premise that it is a threat to Utah’s election integrity, Monson said.

“First of all, it’s not true. And second of all, you’re projecting a lack of trustworthiness that doesn’t exist,” Monson said.

Candidates and policymakers have a responsibility to talk about “the institution of elections in a way that is accurate to the evidence and that helps us maintain and build a system that’s trusted and trustworthy,” Monson said. Otherwise, Monson said, if political figures subject evidence to a partisan agenda, then policy discussions could actually move the state further away from election confidence.

“If we are talking about and couching the debates in the wrong way, then we’re going to undermine confidence even if we make policy improvements,” Monson said. “It’s like a Pyrrhic victory. We burn down the system in order to ‘make progress.’”