Utah County puts controversial voting method that resulted in election errors on hold

Utah County’s Republican clerk is pressing the brakes on his controversial “Fast Cast” voting method meant to discourage casting a ballot through the mail, his office announced Wednesday.

A statement from Clerk Aaron Davidson said he was “unable to reach agreement with the Lt. Governor’s Office before the primary election.”

After the county used the process in last year’s primary election, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson’s office, which oversees Utah’s elections, found 19 more ballots had been cast at polling places throughout the county than the number of people who had checked in.

The system also likely contributed to lengthy waits to cast a ballot in Utah’s second-largest county in November.

“Signature verification has been shown in recent legislative and state audits to be a subjective process, which is something I have raised concerns about since taking office,” Davidson said in a statement, referring to a portion of the verification process for by-mail ballots.

He added, “Fast Cast Voting was our innovative solution to let voters prove their identity in person and have their ballot counted without waiting in line or relying on signature verification.”

Davidson, in a news release Wednesday, said he believes recent changes to election laws “had the unintended consequence of affecting” the use of Fast Cast. “Rather than risk complications so close to the election,” he said, “Fast Cast Voting will be paused until further process changes can be agreed upon [with the lieutenant governor’s office].”

Davidson’s change in plans comes just a few weeks before Utah County’s Aug. 12 municipal and school board primary elections. Tuesday — one day before the announcement — was the first day clerks could send ballots by mail to active, registered voters.

The lieutenant governor’s office did not respond to questions about its recent correspondence with Davidson regarding “Fast Cast,” but provided a statement from Elections Director Ryan Cowley.

“Under Clerk Davidson’s fast cast voting last year, more votes were cast than voters who had a record of voting. County clerks are free to implement any programs in their counties as long as they are in compliance with the law,” Cowley said.

In their news release, Davidson’s office described the method as “a program created to strengthen election integrity by encouraging in-person voting and reducing reliance on the subjective signature verification process.”

It allows voters to bring the ballot they receive in the mail to a polling place after they have filled it out, rather than sending it back through the postal service, and wait in a line separate from other in-person voters. Those voters then must show their ID and sign a check-in list before scanning it directly into a tabulator.

For that to work, according to Henderson’s office, it required that Davidson disable a security measure in vote-counting machines — “creating the potential for multiple ballots to be scanned in by a single voter,” the review read.

“It’s that quick and easy!” the Utah County clerk’s website said prior to a revision notifying voters of the pause on that option.

“Utah County still experienced significant delays in ballot processing,” said state officials’ post-primary review.

It continued, “The way Fast Cast was implemented also could create long lines in the polling places in November. Long lines in polling places can discourage voters from casting a ballot and would delay statewide results on election night.”

That prediction proved accurate, as Utah County voters queued for as long as three hours, with some Election Day lines stretching outside buildings into the cold.

Efforts to curb voting by mail

As he competed to run elections for the hundreds of thousands of voters in Utah County, Davidson was outspoken about his doubts regarding the results of the 2020 presidential election. On his campaign website, without evidence, he wrote, “Based upon the stories I’ve been receiving from the delegate and the ballot irregularities that they have received and heard of, I would venture to say, the voter rolls are nether [sic] up to date nor accurate.”

Davidson has continued to make unfounded allegations of election fraud while in office. He’s repeatedly clashed with Henderson’s office over Utah’s voting laws.

The lieutenant governor publicly criticized Davidson’s decision last year to stop providing already-budgeted prepaid postage on mail-in ballots. And Davidson leveled unsubstantiated allegations at Henderson in a letter shared with public officials and political allies that she and Gov. Spencer Cox had broken the law in qualifying for reelection, and said she should be criminally prosecuted.

Among his efforts to discourage voting by mail, Davidson began experimenting with the “Fast Cast” method during the first election cycle he administered in 2023. In 2024, Utah County saw the lowest turnout of any of the state’s 29 counties in the primary election, and second-lowest participation in the general election.