(gentle music) - [Announcer] Funding for "The Hinckley Report" is made possible in part by Merit Medical and by contributions to PBS Utah from viewers like you.

Thank you.

Tonight on "The Hinckley Report," our expert panelists dive into the state of our elections.

What makes an election secure?

How much confidence do Utahns have in the power of their vote?

And what does recent turnout tell us about voter engagement?

(heroic music) (heroic music continues) - Good evening, and welcome to "The Hinckley Report."

I'm Jason Perry, director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics.

Covering the week, we have Amelia Powers Gardner, a Republican on the Utah County Commission, Doug Wilks, executive editor of the "Deseret News," and Holly Richardson, editor of utahpolicy.com.

We're so glad to have you all on this special edition of "The Hinckley Report."

Tonight, we're gonna talk about election security.

We've just gone through our election.

The final results are coming in.

We know where people are, how they voted, and Utah has been one of those states has been pretty innovative into how we've been able to ensure people have access to the ballot box and to get to more participation.

But I wanna get to the security part of this for just a moment.

And Commissioner, let's start with you.

You were a county clerk overseeing elections in Utah County for a very long time.

When we talked to people around the state and they want secure elections, what do you think that means?

What are they telling you that means?

- I think they wanna be able to have confidence that their vote was counted and that all the eligible votes were counted.

What they really are looking for is transparency so that if they have any questions, those questions can be answered.

- Doug, as you're talking to people and you've done some great work on this past election cycle, what are you hearing?

- Well, it is about trust, right?

People want trust.

They'd like it to be speedy, right?

Sometimes there's frustration, whether it's here in Utah or other states about a vote dragging on day after day, week after week, because then people fill in the gaps of, well, why?

And then you might start with some kind of, there's something wrong or there's a conspiracy, or there's something else at play.

So, you really wanna be efficient.

You wanna be truthful.

You wanna be transparent, and I think there is great confidence in Utah's elections.

So, but that's a key part and key what we're seeing.

- Yeah, Holly, we certainly have adopted the mail-in ballots pretty seriously, the only red state that sends a ballot to every single registered voter inside the state.

Why has Utah been sort of at the forefront of this and why is it so well received?

- I think for a lot of reasons.

One of them is if you're busy at home, right?

If you're somebody like me when I was raising little kids and had an opportunity to send my ballot in by mail, that was easier for me than dragging them out in the stroller and standing in line, waiting to vote.

So ease, I think, is one of 'em.

Rural communities, it's makes it easier for them to participate and it increases voter turnout, which I think, for me, is a really important thing.

When we say we want more voices at the table, this is how we use our voice.

And by increasing voter turnout, I think that's one great positive from vote by mail.

- It's also cheaper.

We don't like taxes in Utah.

We wanna have as low taxes as we possibly can, and it's cheaper to do a vote by mail system.

- Yeah.

People might not realize that is actually the case.

- Yeah.

- That it maybe saves 'em a lot of that infrastructure that has to go into the traditional way.

I wanna get into the security side of it, but I think it might be helpful first for us to show our viewers what happens.

You know, how does the process work.

Once it gets into your mailbox or your house, what happens after you drop it off?

I wanna show a video very quickly.

Let's break it down a little bit.

Amelia, particularly through you, with you who have overseen this in the past.

Let's watch this video about how it happens and then what the next steps are in the state of Utah.

- Voting is one of the most important things in American democracy, and here in the Beehive State, voting is kind of special.

Utah is the only Republican-led state that primarily does vote by mail.

And in 2020, over 90% of Utah voters sent in their ballot.

So how exactly is your vote counted?

I'm Cailley Chella and today I'm at the Salt Lake County Clerk's Office where election workers have been working since mid-October to process those vote-by-mail ballots.

(box lid creaks) - Very few people have access not only to the basement of this building, but to this room, so let's go in.

- [Cailley] Salt Lake County Clerk Lannie Chapman is working to increase transparency in elections.

She gave us a tour of where the county's hundreds of thousands of ballots are processed, using a meticulous system to make sure each vote is counted.

- When ballots come in through either the drop boxes or through the post office, this is where they first start.

- [Cailley] The first step is removing the privacy tab that covers your signature.

- After we remove the signature tab, we'll run them through our Agilis machines.

- [Cailley] Agilis machines do a couple of things, one of which is taking pictures of the signatures to verify them.

Chapman says about 50% of signatures are accepted by the machines.

(ballots shuffle) Upstairs in her main office, Chapman and her team work to verify the rest.

- [Lannie] We'll look at the driver's license signature, the first time they registered to vote, when they changed their party affiliation, prior affidavits.

So, we have a multitude of signatures that we can verify it against.

- [Cailley] Our audio engineer, Nathan, gave permission for her to analyze his signature on camera.

- [Lannie] So, it looks like the way that you start your name here and you go down, up, around to this large- - [Nathan] It's a T. - Okay.

- [Nathan] Yeah.

- Sure.

(Nathan laughs) We'll go with T. - [Cailley] If none of the signatures match, Chapman's team mails out a notice to verify or fix it called a cure letter within 48 hours.

- We're able to verify most of them.

It's a very small percentage per election that are sent a cure letter.

- [Cailley] Once signatures are verified, ballots are opened.

And once a ballot is separated from its envelope, it can no longer be tracked back to the voter.

Then ballots are inspected to make sure they're ready for the scanners.

If there are any issues like a damaged ballot, teams of two copy over those ballots' answers to a new one.

Then, ballots go to the tabulation room.

And this room has another layer of security.

- This room is air-gapped, so there's nothing that is connected to the internet in this room.

And again, key access, only two people have a key to this room.

- [Cailley] Here, scanners read the ballots and votes are recorded into a secured system.

- We can't even look at what the results are until after 8:00 PM on election night.

- The ballots are then stored for a minimum of 22 months in case of a recount or a court contest, and then they're incinerated, and that is the end of a lifecycle of a vote-by-mail ballot in Salt Lake County.

For more politics and public affairs content and reporting, make sure you follow @pbsutah on Instagram and subscribe to our YouTube channel.

I'm Cailley Chella.

Thanks for watching.

- All right, Commissioner, talk about that process a little bit.

Is it similar to what happened in Utah County?

Maybe tell us how this is replicated throughout the state.

- Yeah, it's very similar.

The state of Utah has done a very good job of setting forth standards and laws that really standardize a lot of these processes to a point across the state.

Now, each county is going to have a little bit of a different process because we do run elections locally.

I think it's important for people to realize that every election in this country, whether you're voting for president or for mayor of your city, is run locally.

And there's actually security in that, because if every process is a little bit different, you couldn't hack all of the processes with one.

Utah County, because we're a large county like Salt Lake County, we have very similar processes.

We use an Agilis.

We use an OPEX.

The scanners were a little different, but the basic processes are gonna be the same, and you're gonna find that across the board.

- Doug, talk about this very interesting point.

You know, it's the local elections to the president of the United States, the same.

But if you talk to people, as you and I have with our own polling that we have done, the confidence in the elections, very high at the local level, less so at the national level.

- Well, it's probably the greatest security issue is that each county is responsible for the election because there isn't an overwhelming database.

There isn't opportunity to stuff the ballot.

I mean, you can't organize to change the election.

And where there are irregularities, there are few.

It's overwhelmingly small.

I read a statistic that since like 2000 or 2001, anyway, the past 20 years, you have 250 million votes, mail-in ballots.

And there were like prosecutions, like under 200 of those millions and millions of ballots, and Utah benefits because we have gone to vote by mail prior to any politicization of the issue.

It was strictly because we need, how do we increase turnout?

We were disappointed in what the turnout was.

And then by 2020, you had like 90% turnout, I believe the figure was.

- [Jason] Yeah.

- It's a little less this past election, but Republicans and Democrats overwhelmingly in our polling that we do with Hinckley and the "Deseret News," I think even 72% of Republicans want that.

So, it's not a political issue here.

It can inch into that space, but it started in a very pure way to get the vote out.

- Yeah, Holly, talk about why that's the case and they had the numbers exactly right.

And when it comes down to how many people are voting, it's well over 80% of Utahans are doing it.

So why is this a consistent theme?

We just saw a very unique view of what happens through the system that most people don't know.

But why is that continuing to be a consistent theme that even though the process is set this way, we're all using it, there's still sort of that tinge of, maybe I don't trust it?

- Well, I think you have to look at some major party candidates who sow doubt on the process, right?

And one of the things that's interesting about this year's election is that those doubts have gone away.

You don't hear anymore about how unsafe vote by mail is.

We're not hearing that.

We're not hearing that the election was stolen.

People are happy with the results overall, right, and accepting the results and a peaceful transfer of power coming in January.

So, my family and I at Thanksgiving dinner yesterday sat down and talked about election security.

It's a fascinating topic.

- [Jason] This is what happens at your house?

(Holly laughs) - I'm only halfway kidding, but really, I think it's so interesting, right, as Doug pointed out, that we have confidence in our local elections.

We have confidence in our local elected officials.

And then the further away we get, the less confidence we have, even though it's really the same process.

- Well, since we are doing a county by county, we should talk about that a little bit.

Commissioner, you had an opportunity to oversee all this in Utah County.

We've had some issues again this election cycle with Utah County.

Talk about that for just a moment.

What happened?

Because it does play into this overall narrative.

- Can I go back one second?

Before I answer, I wanna add to what Holly said.

Utah was 49th out of 50 states for female voter participation.

We did not have women voting at a high level in Utah until we instituted vote by mail.

We now come in anywhere between around 26th.

We're right in the middle, almost right in the middle for eligible female voter participation.

Vote by mail is the deciding factor in that.

- [Jason] Yeah.

What changed?

Why do you think that's the case?

- It's really hard for moms to stand in line to vote.

It's really hard for moms to stand in line to vote.

And I know that you'll have moms out there that say, "Well, I vote every election."

Well, so do I and so did my mother, but not all moms have the ability to wrangle three children or whatever the case may be.

So in Utah, one of the main reasons that our voter participation has gone up so much, but, you know, as the first woman to serve as the Utah County clerk, and now the first woman to serve as Utah County commissioner, I have six children.

Moms' voices matter.

And I think that that's one reason Utahns like this so much is because it allows all Utahns equal access to the ballot.

- Great point.

- So.

- Utah County.

- Utah County.

It was a rough year.

I kind of felt like I have whiplash.

It was rough and then I ran for office and then we won some national awards and it was rough again this year.

Utah County was just, the clerk's office was unprepared for an election of this size.

We didn't have the highest voter turnout when I ran the presidential election.

We had, as you said, almost 90%.

It was just over 89% in my county, lower voter turnout.

But the difference was that the office was not as prepared doing what I like to call the boring things, but the boring things that matter, right?

Projecting how many voters we're gonna have.

Making sure you have enough for people to show up at the polls.

Looking at historical factors like the 2020 presidential election.

Had the preparation been the same, we would've been fine.

We, as County Commission, worked diligently to make sure they had the resources they needed.

Having been in that seat myself, I know how resource constraints can play.

So we made sure they had budget.

We made sure they had staffing.

We made sure that they had the resources from the rest of the county, from HR, from IT, from public works.

The sheriff's department stepped up.

But it was just really an under preparation.

- Doug, when we have issues like this and there was issues from the very long lines, you know, the getting paper to print the ballots, ink issues, how is this impacting sort of the perception of maybe the connectedness to the mail-in ballot process itself and the overall perception of the system?

- Well, it does hurt, right?

So, on election night, you know, we're in a newsroom and you're trying to get national figures and others, and a lot of the states in the West where there's mail-in ballots, it was taking a long time to get the results.

Well then people say, "Well, clearly the West is trying to do something different."

If you can count ballots quickly elsewhere in the country or around the world they count them pretty quickly, and then you start to lose trust in the process.

So, it is frustrating if you hear a story coming out and it's nine at night and the state's not releasing any figures.

'cause they say, "Well, we don't have Utah County.

We don't have these things coming in."

You've gotta have enough paper.

You've gotta have enough toner.

You have to have enough polling places.

It seems ridiculous to the voter, to the viewer at this time who want a result.

Now, we are not very patient in society.

So at the end of the day, does it matter if it comes in that night or the next day or waiting till it's actually canvassed and we get the final result?

But it does erode trust if you have these kinds of problems that are so avoidable because a reasonable person says, "Well, we can't be incompetent, so it must be intentional.

And if it's intentional, there must be something wrong."

So every step of the way is to battle that.

- Holly, so sometimes issues like this, or some things that happen in Utah County can result in legislation.

'Cause of course our legislature's paying close attention for all the reasons we just talked about.

And there was an issue there in Utah County that has prompted a bill to come back.

And it's whether or not a county clerk, for example, can access a public official's ballot to see how they submitted it.

Did they do it by mail?

Did they put a stamp on it or not put a stamp by that?

But what happened this time?

Maybe talk about the circumstances that happened there because a bill is coming.

- Sure, so Senator Mike McKell who's down in the Spanish Fork area, he found out that the county clerk, Utah county clerk, had tracked his ballot and how it was submitted.

So in the primary, he submitted it by mail without putting a stamp on it.

Well, to his credit, Senator McKell is like, "That's like one step from opening my ballot and seeing how I voted," right?

But the county clerk said, "Well, I can do that to any elected official," right?

All I have to do is look at how they drop it in the drop box or whatever.

So we know there was at least two elected officials in Utah County that had their ballots tracked by the county clerk on how they were submitted.

So in this, most- - [Amelia] Mine was tracked, as well.

- So, at least three.

- [Amelia] We know at least three.

- At least three, so, we know in the most recent interim session, which is the last one of the year in November, the Government Operations Interim Committee had a sample bill or draft bill put in front of them that said if any elected official tracks a bill, it's actually now a crime.

It would be a crime.

- [Jason] A Class B misdemeanor.

- Yes, so I think it passed unanimously in the Interim Committee.

I suspect it's not gonna have trouble passing during the legislative session in January.

And it's one of the issues we're saying, you just can't looky-loo at the ballots, right?

- That was what Representative Gricius called it too, right?

The Looky-Loo Legislation.

- Yep.

- Go ahead and talk about this.

- Yeah, well, I think it's important to point out the inconsistencies.

Clerk Davidson claimed that you could look this up on the lieutenant governor's website, but you can't.

What you can see on the lieutenant governor's website is whether the person returned the ballot they were mailed or whether they showed up at the polls to vote.

But the lieutenant governor's website does not show whether or not they put a stamp on it or whether they've used the mail or a drop box.

It doesn't differentiate that.

That was something that the clerk was doing himself.

Also, to go one step further to say was a stamp put on this, the Agilis machine doesn't check for a stamp.

And so, in order to determine which ones had a stamp and which ones didn't, he was having his staff manually sort all of the ballots that came in by mail to say, these ones have a stamp and these ones don't, and then he was running those separately, so adding additional steps just so that he could track those ballots, and I think that's why the legislature was so concerned.

- There's one, go ahead, Doug.

- It's just, listen to the conversation we're having, right?

I mean, the public will be home or, you know, it's Friday night and you're watching this show, and they go, "What are they talking about?"

Well, we're talking about it because this happened and it seems so ridiculous.

What's the intent of tracking someone's ballot who's a political figure?

Well, it's not just for interest's sake.

Are you gonna do something with that information?

There's no reason to do it and it shouldn't be done.

And it violates the spirit of elections, which is, I have a voice.

I can write.

I can do my ballot and it should be private.

- I think there's a good point here that the clerk's office should be nonpartisan.

Even though I was an elected Republican, Lannie is an elected Democrat.

We worked very closely together.

County clerks shouldn't be differentiating politics.

They should be executing the law and recognizing that they don't just serve a faction.

They don't serve the delegates of the party that elected them.

They serve all the citizens who cast a ballot whether or not they voted for them.

- Two more things that might come up with our legislature, Doug, since you got to this conversation about people do want the results quickly and mail-in ballots do help us to get that, but there's a lingering question with bills that we may see again about whether or not we should wait for those postmarked ballots.

Like, maybe we should just count those.

The ones we have on election night, those are the ones that count, as opposed to you mailed it before the election night, which is the current law, but they keep wanting to change.

Well, some are wanting to change that a little bit with the legislature.

Does that impact the process at all or people's ability to have their vote counted?

- Well, I think we talked about, you want it to be efficient, so if where there's deficiencies, figure out a way to do that.

You know, what do the rules say?

If you need to postmark it, if you need to put it in a box, do you need to have an Election Day itself?

You know, we have this kind of election season now.

Do you need to do something different the week before and begin counting the week before, but without the results?

I think no one is necessarily against making it more efficient and eliminating the questions.

But what is that process?

And I think that requires, you know, hearty debate and then some good decision making.

And if you can get it outta the politics, you're gonna be better off.

- I have to be honest, there aren't that many ballots that come back postmarked after Election Day.

- Yeah.

- We require it to be postmarked the day before the election.

Federal law requires election mail to be expedited.

There are some stragglers that come in, but when you're looking at the margins, with the exception of a very close race, which, I mean, on a ballot, you usually have one, maybe two on a given ballot with dozens of races, most of those, the ones that come in, don't really affect us calling an election.

We don't certify elections until 14 days later.

We've always done that.

It's just that ability to call it.

Really, there's other things that take more time and those are the provisional ballots, right?

I had to cast a provisional ballot because I moved just before the election.

Within 30 days of the election, I moved and didn't have proof of residency for my new address.

So, I had to wait for that and cast a provisional ballot.

Those are what take more time.

The few that straggle in in the mail a couple of days after the election, the vast, vast majority of the time, they're outside the margin of error.

- You're going through, you know, calling an election, you know, Associated Press, CNN, others, you have exit polling that you're looking at.

With mail-in ballots, you're not at a poll to talk to someone who's exited.

But you can look at primaries.

You can see what the trend lines are, and then media tries to be pretty careful, you know.

It gets criticized, sometimes justifiably, but pretty careful on when it's calling an election.

And certainly "Deseret News" and most media will not just arbitrarily call an election.

And even when others are calling, you still wanna have total confidence to make sure that the voter has their vote counted.

- Yeah, to your point, we counted over 80% of our ballots on election night in 2020.

We had 292,000 ballots cast and we were able to publish before midnight on Election Day 80% of those results.

You can take- - [Doug] Yeah.

- Between exit polls and those numbers, you can come up with a trend as long as the margin isn't very close.

- And where the outstanding votes are.

You know, if in a county like Salt Lake County, which tends to have a more Democrats versus Utah County, you can kind of make some projections, and those are rarely inaccurate.

- [Amelia] Yeah.

- Go ahead, Holly, and then I wanna ask you about one more piece of legislation.

- Well, I was just gonna say that, like, the Associated Press this year, not only did they call races, but every time they called a race, they gave you the explainer on why they called it, right?

This is why we called John Curtis as soon as the polls closed, right?

This is why we called, you know, XYZ race because John Curtis was far ahead in the polling in Utah, he's Republican and he was on track to win and they called it really early.

So, I thought that was helpful, too.

And I think that was one of the reasons that they did it, is to provide some level of assurance that there was reason behind why they called races early.

- Okay, let's talk about one more piece of legislation that might come.

The Elections Office is held within the Lieutenant Governor's Office, one of the assigned responsibilities of lieutenant governor.

We may see some legislation, Holly, if you'll talk about this, that would suggest that instead of being in the Lieutenant Governor's Office, there should be a secretary of state or independent election board made up of as many as seven people.

Let me read the quote from our speaker talking about this, and then your comment.

We'll have yours and all the rest of yours, as well.

This is from the speaker, Mike Schultz.

He says, "Regardless of how you feel about the current governor or the current lieutenant governor, having them oversee the elections is not a good look.

If you're worried about collusion, coercion, things like that, I think seven sets of eyes is a lot more transparent than one set of eyes."

This is a big shift right here.

Talk about it.

- It is a big shift, and at the same time, it's not that unusual.

So, Utah is one of only two states where the lieutenant governor still supervises elections.

We used to have a secretary of state, went away from that.

Now, it looks like we may go back to that.

I think Speaker Schultz maybe oversells the point of collusion.

I don't think there was collusion.

I think our elections are safe and secure, right?

And I personally think it's a little bit of a poke in the eye to the executive branch from the legislature, but I think that there's really high chances of that bill passing and making election reform that way, pulling it out from under the lieutenant governor.

- Doug?

- Well, what's the problem you're trying to solve?

Is there a perception problem and you wanna be more transparent because you wanna make sure the public has just a greater measure of confidence, or do you actually think there's been problems since we became a state in Utah with our elections?

They've been secure.

Where is the issue?

Has it changed a race?

The greater conversation is on the caucus system and the convention system and who gets to run?

And that becomes, you know, something that'll also raise up, but, or rise up.

But this debate is probably worth having, given that Utah seems to be a bit of an outlier with where we are.

But there are other issues I think that might be more important than that one.

- [Jason] Commissioner, please.

Your take.

- Yeah, I think the question that Doug asked is what problem are you're trying to solve is very poignant.

When legislators have come and asked me about this and they say, "Well, I don't think it's right that the lieutenant governor oversees her own election," I ask them a couple of questions.

Question number one, how many ballots does the Lieutenant Governor's Office count?

The answer is zero.

They don't actually oversee the election.

All they do is ensure that the county clerks are following the law.

That wouldn't change with a secretary of state.

The second thing I ask is, "Do you feel comfortable with your county clerk?

And do you trust your county clerk?"

And they say, "Yes."

And I say, "Great.

They count their own ballots."

They are elected and they actually count the ballots for the election in which they're elected.

But none of this legislation addresses that.

I think this is really more of a perception issue.

If you look at, you're right, we only have two states where the lieutenant governor oversees elections.

There's only eight states where the secretary of state is appointed.

In 80%, in 40 of the states in this nation, the secretary of state is elected and then oversees the election.

So, I think that if we want to shift to a secretary of state, I'm not opposed to that, but I don't think it's solving the problem they think it's solving.

- [Jason] Holly, go ahead.

- Yeah, I just agree with that.

And to Doug's point, I think there will be also legislation on the caucus convention system.

I've heard rumors of bills coming from both sides, both to strengthen the caucus convention system and to strengthen the signature gathering process.

We'll see how that plays out on the Hill, but we're gonna see, I think, a lot of election bills this year.

- Doug, just the final point here is just one thing you can think of we can do in the state of Utah to really increase the confidence in the system in our last 15 or 20 seconds.

- Just get rid of all the money.

Money and power are corrupting.

That's too big of a topic, but where you can streamline it, get confidence.

I think Utah's a extremely well run state.

I mean, I'm a member of the media, but just look at the data, look at the facts, and it's a very well run state with good leadership and, yeah, debate the issues and then make a good choice.

- Very good.

Happy last comment.

Thank you so much for your insights this evening, and thank you for watching "The Hinckley Report."

This show is also available as a podcast on pbsutah.org, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you for being with us.

We'll see you next week.

- [Announcer] Funding for "The Hinckley Report" is made possible in part by Merit Medical and by contributions to PBS Utah from viewers like you.

Thank you.

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