Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson certified the state’s recent primary election results on Monday amid allegations from electors that the state’s all-mail voting system disenfranchised their votes.
“Statewide and multicounty canvass is complete,” Henderson announced on X. “Much gratitude for the county clerks, poll workers, candidates, and voters who made it all happen.”
The Beehive State’s certification of its June 25 primary results did not come without controversy. In the weeks following the contest, it became clear that hundreds of ballots mailed by voters in Utah’s southern counties had not been counted due to what county officials believe was a postmark issue, despite voters’ purported adherence to state law.
Unlike most states, Utah employs an all-mail voting system in which voters on the Beehive State’s registration lists are automatically mailed a ballot ahead of Election Day. State law requires voters’ mail ballots to be “postmarked by the day before Election Day,” according to Ballotpedia.
While the aforementioned voters claimed to have mailed their ballots on or prior to the postmark deadline, their votes were not counted. As I previously wrote in these pages, the issue apparently stemmed from how the U.S. Postal Service processes mail for approximately nine southern Utah counties. According to St. George News, mail processing for the region “has shifted” from Provo, Utah, to Las Vegas, Nevada, “where it is scanned, barcoded, and postmarked.”
Local officials hypothesized that routing these counties’ mail to Las Vegas for processing produced a scenario in which ballots mailed before June 24
