ELECTIONS, POLITICS, & GOVERNMENT
Utah County no longer paying return postage on mail-in ballots
Jan 24, 2024, 6:22 AM | Updated: 9:26 am
For Utahns who have a primary election to vote on, ballots are being sent out starting Tuesday. A voter holds a mail-in ballot in Provo on Friday, Nov. 4, 2022.
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PROVO — A change is coming to Utah county voters who want to return their ballots in the mail. Starting with the primary election in 2024, Utah county will no longer pay return postage for by-mail ballots to get delivered.
The postage will need to be paid by the voter, and if they can’t or don’t, the United States Post Office delivers ballots anyway and charges the county.
County Clerk Aaron Davidson says he’s making the change to push people to drop boxes and to save taxpayer money.
“The main reason is [that] I like to I’d like to maintain custody of the ballots, and when it goes through the mail in process to the US Postal Service, we lose custody of that whenever we handle a ballot. The Utah County Office, we have to have two people there at any time, but I don’t know if they have to have two people,” Davidson told KSL TV.
Davidson said he wasn’t accusing the post office of anything, but rather it was about his preference for the security of drop boxes.
“I’m trying to do everything I can to move people to the three free options, basically… drop it in a drop box, vote in-person or early in-person voting. There’s three ways to do it for free,” he said.“If you want the option and the convenience of doing it through the Postal Service, you have to pay for that convenience.”
Davidson first made the revelation in a legislative committee on Monday, testifying in favor of a bill that would require by-mail ballots to be received in the office by election day, not postmarked the day before. He was the lone clerk in Utah to be in favor of that change.
“It’s not [that] I don’t trust [the USPS.] It’s just that we had over 600 ballots returned to us with postmarks after the deadline and some of them were on Election Day. And so there’s still people that believe that they can mail their ballot in on Election Day,” Davidson said.
Right now, so long as ballots are postmarked the day before election day or taken to a drop box on election day, the vote will be counted. They can be received up until the day of the canvass which happens two weeks later.
Continue reading at ksltv.com
Related:
- On the first day of the Utah legislative session, talk of changes to mail-in ballots
- Follow the Ballot: Multiple security features accompany Utah mail-in ballots
