A recount is underway in Utah’s 2nd Congressional District and a lawsuit challenging the results has been filed with the Utah Supreme Court.
As promised, Colby Jenkins requested the recount with the Lt. Governor’s Office on July 29. He trailed incumbent Celeste Maloy by 214 votes in the June primary election, which fell within the recount margin of 0.25%.
County clerks in the district, which includes parts of Salt Lake and Davis Counties and stretches down to Southern Utah, will spend the next week going through all the votes that were cast. According to state election code, clerks must finish the recount seven days after the candidate’s request — Aug. 5 in this case.
Salt Lake County Clerk Lannie Chapman said her team anticipated a recount was coming. They already have a lot of things organized, like which poll workers are going to help with the process. She said they were just waiting for the word from the Lt. Governor’s Office.
“We knew we wanted to start as soon as possible. So, we got to start bright and early this morning.”
In Salt Lake County, Maloy won roughly 57% of the vote, while Jenkins was left with 42%. Chapman now has to reprocess the approximately 24,711 votes that were cast and certified on July 9. She also has to re-verify the signatures and make sure ballots sent by mail have the correct postmark date. The team will also go over the ineligible ballots to make sure they are still ineligible. If there was a mistake and a ballot was supposed to be counted, Chapman said it would be added to the recount tally.
Once all that is completed, there will be another post-election audit, where a random 3% of the ballots will be selected.
Chapman expects her team will wrap things up by late Tuesday night, do the audit on Wednesday and then the board of canvassers will certify the results on Thursday. However, Chapman noted some counties may not be done as quickly as Salt Lake County and that’s perfectly normal.
Her team is “always confident with the count the first time” and doesn’t think the vote total will significantly change after the recount is done.
“However, this gives us an opportunity to re-review everything, re-tabulate all the ballots that were processed the first time [and] re-adjudicate them,” she said.
Republican Sen. Todd Weiler is confident the recount will still be in Maloy’s favor, but said Jenkins “has every right to request a recount.”
“While the margin is close, it's not five or six votes, it's not eight or 10 votes, it's 214 votes. And I don't expect that the recount is going to change that much.”
Historically, recounts rarely reverse the original outcome of the race.
In an analysis of 6,929 statewide races nationwide in 2023 by FairVote, only three were overturned. The last time a recount successfully reversed the initial outcome was a 2008 U.S. Senate race in Minnesota.
Rather, Weiler said there’s a good chance that Maloy will pick up more votes following the recount. And that tracks with the FairVote analysis, which states recounts “typically widen the gap between the top two candidates instead of decreasing it.”
Jenkins told KUER he will petition the Utah Supreme Court over the results, claiming some “legal votes” were barred from being counted in southern Utah due to postmarks. The goal of the lawsuit, Jenkins said, is to ensure “every legal vote gets counted.”
“There are so many stories, people contacting us, submitting sworn affidavits that we will be including in our legal filing,” he said. “A gentleman that provided a sworn affidavit, he mailed his ballot on June 17, here in southern Utah a full week before the deadline and was disqualified.”
Iron County had threatened to delay the county canvass on July 9. Commissioner Paul Cozzens said more than 400 ballots were postmarked after the June 24 deadline despite voters stating they mailed their ballots either the day of the deadline or days before. Some mail in southern Utah is sent to a Las Vegas United States Post Office for processing.
Weiler pushed back against the logic of filing a lawsuit.
The argument, he said, seems like a valid concern but ballots being shipped to Las Vegas “is not new to rural Utah.” Rather, before they were shipped to Nevada, Weiler said they were routed to Provo, which if the voter lives in St. George “is twice as far as Vegas.”
However, Jenkins said southern Utah ballots being shipped to Las Vegas is part of his concern, especially since ballots in more urban areas of the state, like Salt Lake and Davis counties, can get their ballots postmarked the same day.
“But if you do that down here in southern Utah, it doesn't get postmarked [until] two to three days later,” Jenkins said. “How does equal protection under the law exist in those circumstances?”
Weiler said there are many ways a voter can submit their ballot before the postmark date. They can place it in a secure dropbox, hand it to an election worker or go to the post office in person to have it postmarked.
“He [Jenkins] keeps on saying ‘I want all the legal ballots counted.’ And I keep on saying they were all counted. They're not legal ballots if they're postmarked after the deadline,” Weiler said.
Jenkins doesn't know what the “legal remedy” of the situation would be and it would be up to the Utah Supreme Court to decide, but that could include allowing the ballots delayed by the Postal Service to be counted.
“While we certainly want to win, for sure, but the bigger issue is we want to make sure that every legal vote sees the light of day.”
