Utah Gov. Spencer Cox is slated to soon sign a bill to end the state’s practice of automatically sending all registered voters a mail-in ballot. The move, once enacted, will force voters to request a ballot, thereby making it harder for Utahns to vote.
The bill—recently passed by both chambers of the Republican-controlled Utah Legislature—is a direct result of President Donald Trump’s lies that mail-in ballots cost him the 2020 presidential election. Trump has railed against voting by mail in the lead-up and aftermath of that election, spewing lies that the voting method is not secure and is rife with fraud. Because of this, he has convinced a large number of Republican voters that voting by mail must be stopped.
Cox admitted that voting by mail is secure, but he said the bill the Legislature passed and that he is likely to sign—which would require voters to request a mail-in ballot and make sure the ballot is in election officials’ hands by Election Day rather than merely postmarked on that date—will quell voters’ misplaced fears over election security.
“I’m very supportive of it. I think it’s a brilliant bill,” Cox said earlier this month, according to the Washington Post. “Lots of people wrongly believe that we have mass fraud in our elections, and it’s just not true, but we need to restore trust to them as well.”
According to a report from The Salt Lake Tribune, the voting restrictions in the Utah bill were pushed by the Heritage Foundation. That’s the same organization that assembled the destructive Project 2025 roadmap that Trump has implemented since he took office.
The Salt Lake Tribune reported that in the first iteration of Utah’s bill, “voters would have continued receiving ballots in the mail but would have returned them in person and shown an ID. They would have been able to apply for an exception to that by visiting a county clerk’s office, where their ID would be inspected.”
But the bill changed when the Heritage Foundation got to a GOP lawmaker, handing him an “Election Security Scorecard” that said Utah ranks 33 out of the 50 states for election security based largely on its “absentee ballot management.” Utah got dinged by the Heritage Foundation because it has a permanent absentee ballot list and sends ballots to all registered voters.
Now voters will have to jump through additional hurdles to get their ballots, which could lower turnout.
“There are going to be people who are expecting their vote-by-mail ballot and are not going to get it, who are going to say, ‘Well, it’s just not worth it and I don’t have time to go in at this point and vote in person,’” Melarie Wheat, the Utah advocacy director for Mormon Women for Ethical Government, told The Washington Post.
Utah—one of eight states that conducts elections entirely by mail—may not be the only state where it becomes harder to vote.
Congressional Republicans are seeking to pass a bill to require all voters in the United States to provide proof of citizenship to register, which would make it difficult or impossible for many people to successfully register as they are missing or do not have access to the necessary documents.
It’s legislation in search of a problem. Noncitizens are not able to register to vote. However, Trump lied throughout the 2024 campaign by falsely claiming that undocumented immigrants were voting.
Ultimately, Utah is now the second state in recent days to try to change state law in order to appease believers of Trump’s “Big Lie.” Oklahoma’s right-wing head of public schools, for example, is seeking to change the state curriculum to brainwash students into believing that there were “discrepancies” in the 2020 election.
