House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, stands at the dais after being sworn in as speaker at the Capitol in Salt Lake City on the first day of the legislative session, Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
The Utah House’s top Republican leader has thrown his support behind a newly-unveiled bill that would vastly limit Utah’s universal vote-by-mail system and implement new ID requirements.
House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, told reporters Thursday he’s backing HB300, a bill that would require most voters to drop off their mailed ballots in-person at a polling place or at a drop box manned by at least two poll workers — and show a valid form of identification, like a driver license, to submit their ballot.
The bill is being sponsored by Rep. Jefferson Burton, R-Salem, who also chairs the House Government Operations Committee — a committee that will be the first to hear many of election-related bills that lawmakers have so far proposed for the 2025 legislative session, which so far amount to more than a dozen.
As currently written, HB300 would still allow Utah voters to receive their ballots in the mail — but unless they receive permission, they won’t be able to mail them back to their county clerks.
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The bill does lay out a process for a voter to “apply for designation as a voter who may return a remote ballot by mail” if they fill out a form and submit it in person at their county clerk’s office while showing a valid form of identification at least 45 days before the election. If they get approval, that designation would only last two years, according to the bill.
During a media availability Thursday, Schultz told reporters he doesn’t think HB300 would effectively defeat the purpose and convenience of voting by mail, but that it’s meant to increase voter confidence and election security. He added Utahns will still be able to receive their ballot in the mail, take their time to decide how to vote, and return it on their own time.
“I don’t think it’s that big of a step,” Schultz said. “You take that ballot that you receive in the mail and you drop it off at a polling location, and the biggest thing is you show your ID.”
Changing Utah’s election system was a top priority Schultz outlined headed into the 2025 session that started Tuesday. The House speaker raised questions about the security of Utah’s vote-by-mail system, after a pair of audits flagged some errors on Utah’s voter rolls and signature verification — but they did not identify sweeping problems or widespread fraud.
Last month, a legislative audit found no “significant fraud” in Utah’s election system. However, it did find some errors, including 1,400 “likely deceased” voters that hadn’t been removed from voter rolls. Of those, 700 were marked as “active” voters, and in 2023 two ballots were cast in the names of voters classified as “deceased.”
Out of 2 million registered voters, those are small numbers — but still too many for Schultz, who characterized Utah’s voter rolls as “a mess.” He also argued Utah should not be “one of the only red states that does not require ID when voting.”
Utah does already require two forms of ID and proof of residence to register to vote, but does not necessarily require an ID when casting a vote. Today, the vast majority of Utahns use by-mail ballots to vote, which election workers verify by matching signatures county clerks have on file for each voter.
Schultz argued legislative audits have shown problems with relying on signature verification. “We now have two audits that show signatures don’t really work, and that they’re not really secure,” he said.
However, that’s not what legislative auditors wrote in their report on the state’s signature verification process for candidate petitions.
“Adjustments can be made to the signature verification process to improve controls and transparency, but the verification process is accurate between 97.6% and 98.7% of the time for correctly validating signatures and between 93.6% and 99.1% of the time for correctly invalidating signatures,” auditors wrote.
But those error rates aren’t good enough for House Republicans. “That’s problematic to us,” Schultz said.
Though clerks and Democrats have urged lawmakers to focus on fixing maintenance issues with the voter rolls rather than restricting voting by mail, Schultz said he believes those audits make the case for sweeping changes, including heavier ID requirements.
“That’s the key component to this,” he said. “We think it’s a good combination and strikes the right balance.”
Pressed on whether the bill will eliminate the convenience of voting by mail, the House speaker said “you have to balance conveniency with security.”
He also argued it wouldn’t totally eliminate voting by mail because voters can “opt in” by applying for a remote voter designation with their county clerks. For those who don’t, they’ll have to drop off their ballot at a polling place or a drop box that’s manned by at least two poll workers to check ID.
“The vast majority of people are going to be passing these polling locations at some point in time (before the election),” he said. “And for those that aren’t, if they still want to continue to do vote by mail, they can sign up and continue to do vote by mail.”
Schultz pointed to a national Pew Research Center survey conducted last January that showed 81% of Americans support requiring all voters to show government-issued photo identification to vote.
He also indicated that he doesn’t like the company Utah is keeping when it comes to which states allow all elections to be conducted entirely by mail.
“Utah is the only red state in the nation to do universal vote by mail. We are in the same category as Washington, California, Oregon, Nevada, Colorado, Hawaii and Vermont,” he said. “As a conservative state that is not a list I am proud to be part of.”
While Schultz said some Utah Republicans would rather the state “go back to in-person voting on Election Day, we think this is a good balance.”
“We understand and realize that people like (to) vote by mail, but we also understand … that the vast majority of people would have more confidence in the system if you required voter ID,” Schultz said.
Recent poll results released by the Sutherland Institute, a conservative think tank, showed Utahns continue to be overwhelmingly confident in their elections, with 83% of Utah voters saying they were very or somewhat confident. Despite this, Utah lawmakers are proposing changes in the wake of a contentious election that focused more scrutiny on voting in Utah than ever.
Though President Donald Trump won handily in the red state, a bitter gubernatorial race between Gov. Spencer Cox and his unsuccessful challenger, Rep. Phil Lyman, divided the Utah Republican Party and sowed discord and distrust over signature gathering, voting by mail and other issues.
The Sutherland Institute poll, conducted by Y2 Analytics, also surveyed Utahns on what proposals would increase confidence. Requiring photo identification (as opposed to just a signature) when voting by mail would create the biggest boost in net voter confidence, according to the poll. About 51% said that would increase their confidence while 20% said that would hurt their confidence.
That same poll also found that eliminating voting by mail and ballot drop boxes while requiring all voters to cast ballots in person would result in a net decrease in confidence, with 51% saying it would hurt their confidence while 33% said it would help.
Senate leaders say they may have ‘alternative’ ideas
Though the House speaker is bullish on restricting voting by mail and requiring ID to vote, HB300 still has a long way to go before becoming law — and it has to survive the Senate.
Senate Republican leaders told reporters Thursday they’re likely to propose changes, though it remains to be seen what that could entail. While they’re generally supportive of increasing confidence and security in Utah’s elections, they also don’t want to make it too hard to vote.
Senate Majority Assistant Whip Mike McKell, R-Spanish Fork, said Senate Republicans have taken a stance that “we want as many people to vote as possible without cheating.”
Senate Majority Assistant Whip Mike McKell, R-Spanish Fork, talks with reporters during a press conference with Senate leadership at the Capitol in Salt Lake City on the first day of the legislative session, Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
“So we’re going to review the logistics of that bill,” he said. “It’s on the radar now. … It’s time to start looking at it.”
McKell said it’s likely the Senate majority will “have an alternative” to Burton’s bill, but it’s not yet clear what that could look like. He also noted “there’s strong support” for voting by mail.
“The public wants vote by mail,” he said. “So what we want to do is make sure the verification process is clean, easy, doesn’t deter voters, but still keeps those principles of vote by mail.”
However, as he has said before, Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, said he’s supportive of re-evaluating the role signatures play in voting, saying using that for verification puts clerks in a “subjective” position.
“Making them judge whether a signature is accurate or not, we put them in kind of a weird position where … it’s actually a judgment call,” Adams said. “We’ve given them a real challenge.”
The Senate president said that’s “one of the things I’d like to eliminate. If we can make the process more accurate rather than making our clerks be a determinative factor.”
“So that’s one of the things I’d like to try to fix in the voting process,” Adams added. “We’ll get it. We’ll work on it.”
However, Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla, D-Salt Lake City, argued Utah legislators need to keep in mind the problems uncovered by the legislative audits were “very small” percentage wise, “so let’s put things into perspective.”
She argued lawmakers should focus on fine tuning Utah’s current election system rather than resorting to drastic changes — especially changes that could make it more difficult to vote and hurt Utah’s strong voter participation rates.
“I’m really concerned with anything that would just deter people from participating in our democracy,” she said, adding Democrats “will be watching” to see where this bill ends up. “We have concerns. We don’t want to make it more difficult for people to participate. We should make it easier.”
Adams said, “that’s our task.”
“We’re going to go at it,” he said, “and find a way to make sure that you can’t cheat and voting is easy.”
Contributing: Vanessa Hudson, Kyle Dunphey
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