BoltsMag: Utah Was a Rare Red State to Champion Mail Voting. That Era Is Ending.

An old-fashioned, four-legged polling booth is on display in the lobby of the Salt Lake County clerk’s office. Its metal frame roughened and its red, white, and blue privacy curtain wrinkled, it’s a reminder of what voting in Utah looked like in the time before drop boxes for mail ballots and computerized tabulators.

Lannie Chapman, the county clerk who runs this office and serves as the top elections official in Utah’s most populous county, eyed the artifact and considered how different, and difficult, her work would be if the state ever went back to voting the way it did when the old booth was in use.

“No, thank you,” she said at the prospect, laughing. “It’s fun for a photo op, but that’s about it.”

The hypothetical may be a bit too close for comfort. A few miles up the road from Chapman’s Salt Lake City office, at the Utah State Capitol, lawmakers have just put the finishing touches on a major voting-system overhaul: House Bill 300, which passed the Republican-controlled legislature March 6, would end universal vote-by-mail in Utah. 

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Kseniya Kniazeva, director of Nomad Alliance, a nonprofit that supports unhoused Utahns, said the people she works with “constantly” have trouble obtaining and maintaining photo ID. HB 300’s requirement that any would-be mail voter must input the last four digits of an ID card, she told Bolts, could pose an insurmountable hurdle for some. 

“People registering to vote is already a way of them saying, ‘I want to vote and I want a ballot,’” Kniazeva said. “Why would you want people to jump through more hoops?”

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To read full article on Bolts Mag website, click here: https://boltsmag.org/utah-legislation-ending-universal-vote-by-mail/