Utah Rep. Celeste Maloy declares victory, but Colby Jenkins on track for a recount

Congresswoman Celeste Maloy takes her opportunity to talk after Utah’s 2nd Congressional district debate between and herself and Colby Jenkins at the KUED studios at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City on Monday, June 10, 2024. (Pool photo by Scott G Winterton/Deseret News)

The margins in the Republican primary for Utah’s 2nd Congressional became so razor thin on Tuesday as some of the last remaining votes were counted, that Rep. Celeste Maloy’s challenger Colby Jenkins could be on track for a recount.

Yet, Tuesday evening — as counties across the state hit the deadline to canvass their elections — Maloy declared victory on a call with reporters with a slim lead of about 214 votes as of about 8 p.m.

“214 votes is pretty close, but it’s about 213 more votes than you need to win,” Maloy said. “I watched my lead shrink a lot in the last two weeks, but I’m holding strong.”

Updated election results posted Tuesday evening showed Maloy barely hanging onto her lead with 50.1% of the vote (53,748 votes) to Jenkins’ 49.9% (53,534).

Ever since polls closed on June 25, Jenkins has been holding out hope for the possibility of calling a recount, indicating many of his supporters waited until the final days before the primary to cast their votes. As the days ticked by with more votes added to the tally, Jenkins slowly gained ground on Maloy, but it wasn’t until Tuesday evening that he crossed the vote margin threshold for it to be legally possible — at least if the margin holds.

For a losing candidate to be able to call a recount, Utah law requires a margin of equal to or less than 0.25% of the total number of votes cast. As of Tuesday night, there were roughly 107,282 ballots cast and counted in the 2nd Congressional District race, putting the required recount margin at about 268 votes.

If the margin stays under that roughly 268-vote threshold after the statewide canvass on July 22, Jenkins could call a recount within seven days after that date.

“I’ve been in a lot of battles in my life, victory isn’t something you declare,” Jenkins said in a statement to Utah News Dispatch after Maloy declared victory. “You win it, or you don’t. Let Celeste declare victory, and we will win it.”

Greg Powers, Jenkins’ campaign manager, told Utah News Dispatch that as long as the margin stands his campaign intends to call a recount.

“If we’re able to be in a recount, we’ll be in a recount,” he said, still hoping that a recount will provide an opportunity to review for any possible ballots “that should have been counted but weren’t, if there are any ballots that were counted incorrectly, or if there are any ballots that were counted that should not have been.”

Maloy acknowledged the possibility of a recount — but “I don’t anticipate that a recount will change the outcome.”

Jenkins’ campaign hopes recount will allow ballots postmarked late to be counted

During the recount process, Powers said the Jenkins campaign hopes to resolve an issue that’s stirred frustration in southern Utah — and that led one rural county commissioner to vote against certifying his county’s election.

The Iron County Commission on Tuesday eventually did vote 2-1 to certify, but not without heartburn over nearly 500 vote-by-mail ballots that were not postmarked on time, the day before Election Day. Many of those, county officials worried, should have been counted but weren’t due to delays by the postal service because they’re routed to Las Vegas for processing.

Tallying a total of 491 ballots that were disqualified because they weren’t postmarked on time, Whittaker wrote a seething letter to the U.S. Postal Service, saying he was “livid” to learn of so many “pointlessly rejected ballots,” even though many had been mailed days before the deadline, due to the “maddening, 340-mile journey” to Las Vegas for processing.

The Iron County Commission was originally scheduled to vote to certify its election results on Monday, but delayed the vote to Tuesday until right before its deadline under state law amid outcry over those rejected ballots.

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One Iron County resident, Camille Topham, of Enoch, was in tears Monday while she told the Iron County Commission she dropped off her family’s ballots on June 23 (two days before the primary and one day before the postmark deadline), at a postal box at Enoch City Hall. Later on, she said her family members all received letters saying they were rejected because they weren’t postmarked on time.

“I was shocked. I’ve been voting in Iron County for 33 years, since I was 18. I have never had anything like this happen,” she said, choking back tears. “I voted for Jenkins. And to know how close that (race) came, like, yeah. I feel invalidated.”

Topham told commissioners her faith in the election system has “faltered” for “quite some time,” but now she’s lost all faith in the U.S. Postal Service, urging county officials not to use Utah’s automatic vote-by-mail system anymore.

Iron County Commissioner Paul Cozzens sympathized with Topham and many other voters who he said reached out to him and told him of similar experiences. He vowed to refuse to certify the results.

However, Cozzens’ two fellow commissioners — after conversing with state officials including House Speaker Mike Schultz and Senate Majority Leader Evan Vickers — said they believed they were bound by the law. If they refused to certify Iron County’s results, it would force the state to take the county to court and ask a judge to order the county to certify the election.

Their role, as county canvassers, they argued, was to ensure the clerk followed the law while counting votes, and Utah’s law requiring vote-by-mail ballots to be postmarked before Election Day is clear, they said.

Without “iron-clad evidence” that the ballots that were postmarked late were mailed on time,  Iron County Commissioner Michael Bleak said state officials told him, the county would not have a case that would hold up in court. While Cozzens had been collecting voters willing to sign affidavits that they dropped off their ballots on time, state attorneys said that likely wouldn’t be enough to constitute iron-clad evidence.

“This sucks,” Bleak said. “But at the end of the day, we’re a nation of rules that’s governed by the rule of law. And in this particular case, the rule of law is very clear and there is no wiggle room.”

Jenkins’ campaign, however, believes a recount will provide an opportunity to “figure out this postmark issue” — and potentially get those disqualified ballots counted.

“We think we need to shine more light on this, not just for our race but for future races,” Powers said, expressing gratitude to Cozzens for raising the issue. “We’re really disappointed in the way that mail-in ballots have been handled, and the potential for somebody’s constitutional rights to be taken away over something so silly.”

Cozzens said he believed Iron County should have taken a stand, and it would have been worthwhile to hash out the issue in court rather than vote to certify.

While it appears the race is on track for a recount, Powers also said the Jenkins campaign is keeping its options open — and has been considering possibly contesting the election in court, depending on how the next two weeks play out.

When asked if she shared concerns over the number of ballots disqualified because they missed the postmark deadline, Maloy told reporters she wanted to be “really careful how I answer questions about ballots.”

She said she trusts clerks to do their jobs, and “I’m not going to question the validity of the election. I think we should all be careful about doing that.”

“It’s important that we count every legal ballot. It’s also important that people understand the rules of elections,” she said, noting that when she was a deputy county attorney she helped work on curing ballots, “so I know that our counties do a really good job. They’re very thorough, and they make sure people get every chance they can to cure their ballots.”

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