Utah’s 2024 primary election results are certified — but recount, other challenges loom

Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson signs off on the statewide canvass of Utah's 2024 primary election results at the Utah Capitol on July 22, 2024. (Courtesy of the Utah Lieutenant Governor's Office)

Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson officially certified Utah’s statewide election results on Monday — but the Republican contest for 2nd Congressional District is still in flux. 

While Henderson, after reviewing multi-county election results, gave her stamp of approval as required by state law and effectively made statewide election results official, razor-thin vote margins between Utah Rep. Celeste Maloy and her fellow Republican challenger Colby Jenkins positioned the race to be within legal range for Jenkins to call a recount. 

Jenkins’ campaign manager Greg Powers has said they plan to seek a recount as long as the vote margin would allow them to do so within the law. As of Monday afternoon, Jenkins’ campaign had not yet called a recount — but has until a week from Monday to do so.

Official election results showed Jenkins trailed Maloy by a fraction of a percentage point — 0.2% — with 49.9% to Maloy’s 50.1%, or 53,534 to 53,748 votes. That 214 vote margin is the same as nearly two weeks ago, when county officials across the state canvassed and certified their election results. 

That day, Maloy declared victory. “214 votes is pretty close, but it’s about 213 more votes than you need to win,” she said. Though she acknowledged Jenkins was likely to call a recount, she said she didn’t expect “that a recount will change the outcome.” 

For a losing candidate to be able to call a recount, Utah law requires a margin of equal to or less than 0.25% of the total number of votes cast. According to official election results, 107,282 ballots were cast and counted in the 2nd Congressional District race, putting the required recount margin at about 268 votes. Maloy’s slim 214 vote lead positions the race well within recount range. 

“I’ve been in a lot of battles in my life, victory isn’t something you declare,” Jenkins said in a statement to Utah News Dispatch after Maloy declared victory. “You win it, or you don’t. Let Celeste declare victory, and we will win it.” 

Henderson said Utah law allows Jenkins to call that recount, and if or when he does, local election officials will be ready

“That race is within the margin that allows for a recount. Colby Jenkins has every right to ask for one. Whether or not he does is up to him. We are prepared. And the counties involved are prepared to start that recount today if necessary.” 

During the recount process, Powers has said the Jenkins campaign hopes to resolve an issue that’s stirred frustration in southern Utah — and that led one rural county commissioner to vote against certifying his county’s election. 

The Iron County Commission ultimately voted 2-1 to certify election results there, but not without commissioners expressing heartburn over nearly 500 vote-by-mail ballots that were not postmarked on or before the day before Election Day. Many of those, county officials worried, should have been counted but weren’t due to delays by the postal service because they’re routed to Las Vegas for processing. 

In conducting a recount, state law requires county election officials to recount all ballots cast in the race and re-examine all uncounted ballots to ensure they comply with the law. Given Iron County officials expressed frustration about not being able to count the late-postmarked ballots but ultimately voted to certify because state law is clear they can’t be legally counted without a postmark before Election Day, it’s unlikely that a recount will result in a flood of previously uncounted ballots. 

A recount could, however, possibly uncover some discrepancies. Once Jenkins calls a recount, Utah law allows election officials seven days to carry out the process.

Uneventful certification caps off election cycle filled with efforts to undermine election results

Though statewide primary election results aren’t certified by the state board of canvassers (that’s only for the general election), Henderson invited members of the public to the Utah Capitol on Monday to observe her canvass of the multi-county results. Less than a dozen members of the public showed up, and no objections were raised. 

Last week, however, hundreds of supporters for Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s unsuccessful Republican challenger, Rep. Phil Lyman, packed a committee room, at times booing members of the State Records Committee as they denied a request to see signatures in a Washington County race that was only indirectly tied to Cox’s candidacy because the candidate, Sen. Don Ipson, used the same signature gathering company as Cox. 

In a separate but related effort to question the legitimacy of Cox’s candidacy without evidence, Lyman has also filed a lawsuit. He wants a judge to force Utah elections officials to provide all signatures that allowed Cox to get on the primary ballot via Utah’s signature gathering method under the state’s dual path to the ballot, even though state law protects records, including signatures, of voters who opt to classify their records as private.

A judge on Friday rejected Lyman’s urgent request to inspect an unredacted list of GOP voters who signed up to support Cox’s candidacy, along with two other candidates, so they could qualify for the primary ballot. Lyman sought unsuccessfully to see the records ahead of the canvass. The lawsuit is ongoing, and it’s unclear whether it will be resolved before Sept. 6, the deadline for candidates to get their name on the general election ballot, which Lyman’s attorney has previously called the “drop dead” date for a legal challenge. 

Meanwhile, it’s possible other challenges could be coming. Lyman’s campaign on Friday said it planned to contest the state’s election results, requesting election returns — including tabulator information, ballot images, tabulator tapes, and more — from all 29 of Utah’s counties, even though those records are not classified as public records, according to the lieutenant governor’s office. 

Powers, Jenkins’ campaign manager, has also said the campaign may contest the election over concerns about ballots disqualified for late postmarking, though they’d prefer to resolve the issue during a recount. 

If a candidate wants to contest the election, a petition would need to be filed with the Utah Supreme Court, Henderson said. “We’ll see what happens there and move forward as needed.”

Henderson, when asked about efforts to challenge this year’s election in various ways, told reporters Monday she understands candidates who have frustrations with results, but it’s not healthy to “sow doubt.” 

“You know, losing an election is hard. I know, because I have lost an election before. It’s not fun,” she said. “The difficulty is when we sow doubt in processes that are established in law. That’s where I struggle. What my team, and what I know the county clerks try to do, is follow the law.” 

Henderson acknowledged that “the law is not always perfect.” 

“The law doesn’t always benefit everybody in every situation,” she said. “And that’s hard. Sometimes these challenges give us an opportunity to revisit the law. … But I would hope that candidates and the public remember there will be other elections. And if they don’t win one, or the person they wanted to win doesn’t win one, you know what? There’s always going to be another one.” 

Lawmaker proposes legislative changes to address postmarking issue

At least one lawmaker says Jenkins’ campaign has raised a fair point when it comes to postmarking issues, and he plans to seek legislative reforms during the 2025 legislative session, which begins in January.

Sen. Dan McCay, R-Riverton, posted on X on Saturday that he plans to file a bill to “extend the deadline for postmarks” in rural counties by “1-2 days.” In a phone interview Monday morning, McCay told Utah News Dispatch his bill would likely seek to “give the lieutenant governor to have rulemaking authority” to give election officials discretion to extend postmarking deadlines depending on their ZIP codes. 

For Utahns living in ZIP codes where mail is processed in another state, like Iron County, McCay said he wants to allow those voters to “have a postmark buffer of one or two days, something to that effect.” 

McCay’s proposal may hit pushback given election officials often advocate for all counties to adhere to uniform rules. To that argument, McCay said, “if we can control the post office, I would totally agree with that complaint. But last I checked, it doesn’t matter what I put in state code, the U.S. postal service does not care.” 

“That’s really the hard part about having a voting system that is (administered) across a state with a highly urban area and a highly rural area,” he said, comparing Wasatch Front counties where mail might be processed faster than rural counties across the state. “I would never want anybody in rural Utah to feel like their votes are not going to count like they probably feel right now.” 

Since it began allowing counties to opt in to conduct by-mail elections, Utah has required ballots to be postmarked the day before election day, with some concerned that permitting postmarks on Election Day would allow some voters to mail their ballots after 8 p.m., when polls close. 

However, the Utah Legislature has allowed some exceptions — permitting postmarks on Election Day during the COVID-19 pandemic, and for the 2023 special congressional primary election on Sept. 5, which fell on the day after Labor Day. Maloy won the Republican nomination in that primary, and went on to defeat Democrat state Sen. Kathleen Riebe to fill former Utah Rep. Chris Stewart’s empty seat. 

Other legislative efforts to permanently move Utah’s postmark deadline to Election Day have hit pushback. In 2021, then House Minority Leader Brian King, D-Salt Lake City, ran a bill to do exactly that, but it never received a legislative committee hearing. 

“We’ve tried to deal with this three times since I’ve been a legislator, trying to deal with this deadline issue, trying to do hard rules,” McCay said. Now, he said perhaps it’s time to allow more flexibility. 

McCay said the postmarking issue reveals a “weakness in vote by mail.” However, Utah has been using vote-by-mail elections in some form for more than 10 years, and he’s not supportive of pulling it back — though some Republican lawmakers have sought to repeal or restrict Utah’s vote-by-mail system, and those efforts are likely to persist. 

“I’ve heard some folks that want to take a run at doing that,” he acknowledged, though he added he hasn’t seen the details of those bills. “In my opinion, it is hard to put that genie back in the bottle.” 

Henderson told Utah News Dispatch she’s open to legislative reforms regarding postmarking deadlines. 

“I definitely think we should look at that. It’s been something that’s been concerning to me for a while,” she said, though she said she understands why the Legislature has previously kept the deadline before Election Day to prevent ballots being cast after polls close. “But I would be very open to the Legislature looking at that.” 

She also said there are opportunities to look for ways to better coordinate with the post office itself. 

“I do want to say, though, ultimately that burden of responsibility falls on voters,” she said. “Voters have every opportunity. They get mailed ballots three weeks in advance. We have early voting locations. We require every city to have a drop box. We have in-person, same-day voting. And we have messaged very strongly that if a voter wants to mail in their ballot and waits kind of until the last minute to do it, it’s best for them to go into the post office and make sure they actually hand stamp that.” 

Any legislative reforms wouldn’t impact the Jenkins-Maloy race, only future races. Legislative leaders told Iron County commissioners attempting to find any way to count the late-postmarked, disqualified ballots they were not inclined to change election law in the middle of an election. 

Henderson said in the meantime, “we will continue that messaging” to voters to be diligent about making sure their ballots are postmarked on time, and urging them to take advantage of the state’s ballot tracking website to ensure their votes get counted. 

Henderson did say, however, that she would be reluctant to support any legislative efforts to restrict voting. She pointed to a 2024 bill (which didn’t pass) that would have required by-mail ballots to be received by election officials before polls close on Election Day in order to be counted, regardless of a postmark. That could have led to even more by-mail ballots being disqualified. 

“That I felt was too restrictive and unfair, especially given the mailing processes across the state that vary,” she said. 

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