SALT LAKE CITY — Utah House Republican leadership unveiled their solution to perceived weaknesses in the state's vote-by-mail election system: remove the option to "mail in" mail-in ballots for most voters.
One week before the state legislative session began, Speaker Mike Schultz framed the bill, HB300, which was made public on Wednesday, as a way to "solve" multiple problems related to depending on the U.S. Postal Service for ballot submission.
The bill, titled Amendments to Election Law, would require that after a ballot is mailed to a voter, it is returned to poll workers, in person with voter ID. The bill outlines exceptions to in-person ballot return and mandates a certain number of drop boxes in every municipality depending on the number of active voters.
Bill sponsor Rep. Jefferson Burton told the Deseret News in a statement that the priority of the House Republican Caucus with HB300 is to continuously improve state elections to "keep Utah's voting system convenient, accessible and secure."
"We know Utah voters want to receive their ballot in the mail and that will continue," Burton, R-Salem, said. "However, the majority of Utahns, and of Americans, support a requirement to show photo ID to vote."
In a meeting with the combined Deseret News and KSL editorial boards last week, Schultz, R-Hooper, said his determination to reform vote-by-mail is the direct product of multiple legislative audits that have taken place since he helped pass a bill requiring them in 2022.
One audit, released in October, found that over 4% of signatures used for primary qualifications were incorrectly counted or rejected. Another one, released in December, identified inaccurate voter rolls and a lack of statutory compliance by some county clerks.
Another major impetus for reforming vote by mail, according to Schultz, was the extremely close 2nd Congressional District 2024 GOP primary where several hundred ballots were rejected with a late postmark at least in part because of Postal Service delays concerning the Las Vegas distribution center.
"We're not against the vote by mail overall, we just think there's a better way to do it," Schultz said, pointing to a Pew Research Center poll from January 2024 that found 81% of U.S. adults supported requiring people to show government-issued photo identification to vote.
A recent Sutherland Institute poll found that over half, 51%, of Utah voters say that requiring a photo ID when submitting a mail-in ballot would make them either much more or somewhat more confident in Utah elections.
Schultz' Senate counterparts are less keen to implement major overhauls to the state's election system.
On Wednesday, Utah Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, praised the state's county clerks for handling the daunting task of verifying mail-in ballot signatures and tabulating votes with an extremely high degree of accuracy.
But Adams agreed that legislative audits show there is slight room for improvement. Senate Majority Leader Kirk Cullimore, R-Draper, said GOP lawmakers in the Legislature's upper chamber are taking a cautious approach toward many of the electoral reforms emerging from the House.
"If we're doing a policy just because it's reactionary, but it's actually undermining the public's confidence in the election, then we need to take a harder look at that," Cullimore said.
"We want to make sure that people are able to vote easily still. We want to make sure it's secure. We want to take the subjectivity out of it. And so if those policies support that, and give more confidence in the election, I think that's what the Senate could get behind," Cullimore said.
The same Sutherland survey found that 87% of Utah voters were somewhat or very confident that the state counted ballots accurately.
Burton's bill would not change who receives a mail-in ballot. All active voters would still receive a mail-in ballot between seven and 21 days before Election Day.
But voters would not be able to mail in these newly named "remote ballots" under most circumstances.
Voters would need to return their remote ballots at a standard polling place on Election Day or during a 14-day early voting period, or at a ballot drop box on Election Day or during a five-business-day window preceding Election Day.
County election officials would be required to station two poll workers at every drop box between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. during this period to ask for voter name and valid voter identification for all returned remote ballots.
Each county clerk would be required to have at least one fully staffed drop box in every municipality.
If the municipality has more than 10,000 active registered voters, two drop boxes are required, with an additional drop box for every 10,000 active registered voters — or as needed to avoid long lines.
Aside from those covered by the Uniform Military and Overseas Voters Act, Utah voters would be unable to mail in their remote ballots unless they applied for mail-in voter status by submitting a form to their county clerk with valid voter ID.
The bill states that mail-in voter status expires after two years and that ballots submitted via mail must be received by county election officials on or before Election Day to be counted.
Republican representatives in the House are eager to redefine Utah's vote-by-mail election system.
In addition to Burton's bill, House lawmakers introduced more than a dozen bills that would change how Utahns vote by Wednesday, just two days into the 2025 legislative session.
The proposals range from overhauling how candidates qualify for primary elections to transforming vote by mail into an opt-in-only system.
A vocal group of Republican lawmakers, primarily in the state House, say election reform is necessary to shore up voter confidence after an election cycle punctuated by eyebrow-raising audits and uncorroborated allegations of fraud.
But Democratic lawmakers in both the House and Senate worry the session's emphasis on electoral reform is meant to funnel access to the ballot instead of increase fairness in elections.
"Too many of these bills look to us like solutions looking for problems," Rep. Doug Owens, D-Millcreek, told reporters on Tuesday. "If there's a way to convey increased confidence in the system to people who don't have it ... we're open to helping them gain that, but I'm not sure reconfiguring the whole way the process operates is going to help them."
Here are other election bills that have been made public:
