As we enter a new election year, we want to give an update on our ongoing commitment to ensure that Utah has accurate voter registration lists (VRL). Over the past five years, our office has proactively worked with county clerks and legislators to implement additional, more robust voter list maintenance procedures (VLM). Because of these efforts, our voter rolls are cleaner now than they have ever been, but we love finding new ways to improve.
Last year we began a citizenship review of all registered voters in Utah, with two main objectives. The first was to identify potential noncitizens who are registered to vote in Utah. The second was to evaluate each voter registration process, whether online, at a county clerk’s office, or through the state’s Driver License Division (DLD), assessing for systemic weakness or human errors that could lead to ineligible individuals registering to vote, mistakenly or otherwise.
While our citizenship review is not fully completed, we want to share some preliminary findings and other information that may be of interest. Using a snapshot of the statewide VRL, last August we began assessing the entire voter roll of more than 2 million voters.
- More than 99.9 percent of Utah voters are verifiably U.S. citizens.
- We found one confirmed noncitizen who never voted and has since been removed by the appropriate county clerk.
- There are 486 remaining active voters who have either incomplete or inaccurate information on their voter registrations. Our office has sent each of these voters a letter with a new registration form requesting that they complete or update their voter registration by February 1.
- One third of these remaining voters were imported into the statewide voter registration system in 2005, and had registered to vote before Social Security or driver license numbers were used for registration.
- This step in the review focused on active voters who listed a birthplace outside the United States. The next steps in the audit will include inactive voters and those with incomplete information who list their birthplace within the United States.
While reviewing records, we discovered that a change to online voter registration was necessary in order to validate citizenship before a voter could complete and submit a registration form. The online registration website was immediately reprogrammed to automate the citizenship check. Even before the website was reprogrammed, clerks were required to perform an identity and citizenship check on every voter registration. Clerks began attesting their compliance with this requirement to the Lt. Governor’s Office (posted on our website) in June 2023. However, four registrations by noncitizens appear to have come through the website prior to the programming change. All four noncitizens were already removed or have since been removed from the voter rolls, the county clerk has been notified of the voters, and an investigation is being conducted on those individuals. Because we made this discovery before we began the citizenship review, these four individuals are not included in the confirmed noncitizen total reported above.
Throughout our citizenship review process we have worked to strike a balance between identifying and removing ineligible individuals and taking care not to inappropriately remove eligible voters from the voter rolls. Improperly removing an eligible voter is a violation of that individual’s rights and a violation of federal law. It’s also a lousy thing to do.
During the 2022 primary election, every voter in my household got their ballot in the mail, except me. After a few days, I asked someone in my office to look up my voter file to see if I was sent a ballot. They found that my county clerk had marked me as a noncitizen and inactivated my voter registration simply because I was born overseas.
This was not done maliciously; it was the result of a too-aggressive scrubbing of the county’s voter rolls that inappropriately purged eligible voters born outside the United States. My father served in the U.S. Air Force. I was born while he was stationed at a NATO base in the Netherlands. If my county clerk could misidentify me as a noncitizen and improperly purge me from the voter rolls – while I was lieutenant governor and chief election officer of the state – who else might be wrongly caught in such an overzealous dragnet? We did not want to repeat my former clerk’s mistake.
We also learned that the federal government does not keep accurate databases.
There is no central repository of names of all U.S. citizens. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has a compendium of various databases known as the SAVE program that states may use to confirm the citizenship of individual voters. However, this program is notoriously inaccurate and frequently flags individuals who are, in fact, citizens. This most often occurs when a voter is a natural born citizen and has not gone through the naturalization process.
For example, our office submitted 71,314 voter records to SAVE that we were unable to match with DLD data. DHS confirmed the citizenship of 88 percent of those voters, but flagged 8,836 for further analysis by the state. After a manual review process, we were able to narrow the number of unconfirmed voters down to the group of 486 active voters, mentioned previously, who were sent letters this week.
We will continue our work on this citizenship review. And we will continue to work with the legislature and county clerks to improve processes to ensure that our voter rolls are as clean and accurate as possible, and only eligible voters are registered.
