Camille Topham is your typical American voter who sought to cast her vote in Utah’s June 25 primary elections.
Using the Beehive State’s universal mail-in voting system, the Iron County resident and her family reportedly deposited their ballots into a local post box on June 23. Given that this was a day before voters are required by state law to have their mail ballots postmarked to be counted, Topham was surprised to later receive a letter informing her and her family their ballots would not be tabulated because they were not postmarked by the specified deadline.
“I was shocked,” Topham said during Iron County’s Monday commissioners meeting. “I have been voting in Iron County for 33 years, since I was 18. I have never had anything like this happen.”
As it turns out, Topham and her family weren’t the only ones who experienced this problem. In the weeks since the election, hundreds of primary electors in Utah’s southwestern counties have come forward claiming their votes weren’t counted due to the aforementioned postmark issue, despite their alleged compliance with state law.
What Happened
The problem first arose late last week when Iron County Commissioner Paul Cozzens announced in a Friday Facebook post that he learned more than 400 ballots “have not been counted because the [U.S. Postal Service] post marked many of them late by several days.”
County Clerk Jon Whittaker reportedly confirmed this to be true and further claimed that neighboring Washington County similarly identified over 300 ballots “in question.”
