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Audit finds errors with nomination signatures but candidates still qualify

State Elections Director Ryan Cowley responds to an audit done by the Office of Legislative Auditor General on Utah’s signature verification process used to determine if a candidate qualifies for the ballot. It was presented to the Legislative Audit Subcommittee on Oct. 15, 2024.
Saige Miller
/
KUER
State Elections Director Ryan Cowley responds to an audit done by the Office of Legislative Auditor General on Utah’s signature verification process used to determine if a candidate qualifies for the ballot. It was presented to the Legislative Audit Subcommittee on Oct. 15, 2024.

A new legislative audit found some errors with Utah’s signature verification process used to determine if a candidate qualifies for the ballot.

There are two ways a candidate can land on a Utah election ballot. Party delegates can nominate them through the caucus convention system or candidates can gather a certain amount of voter signatures to qualify.

In this case, the Utah Legislature requested the Office of Legislative Auditor General investigate the signatures on nominating petitions for Gov. Spencer Cox, U.S. Senate candidate Rep. John Curtis and Attorney General candidate Derek Brown. All three lost the party convention vote in April, but eventually won the June GOP primary election.

The findings were presented to the Legislative Audit Subcommittee during an Oct. 15 interim session.

The audit discovered some valid signatures were disqualified and some invalid signatures were counted as candidates petitioned to land on the ballot. While the audit concluded the three candidates they looked at successfully qualified for the ballot, it also outlined ways to improve the process.

“As far as we could tell, the candidates met all the rules. They gathered all the signatures,” said Senior Auditor Jesse Martinson. “There's nothing more they could have done. They did everything they were asked to do.”

The audit tested 1,000 signatures from each candidate, along with probing every petition packet they submitted to the Davis County Clerk. Normally, the Lt. Governor's Office verifies signatures for potential candidates, but since Lt. Gov. Deidere Henderson is on the ballot along with Gov. Spencer Cox, the task was outsourced to Davis County.

Andrew Poulter, the lead performance auditor, said each candidate submitted more than 30,000 signatures for review.

Out of the 1,000 signatures sampled by the auditors, they calculated the signature verification error rate for each candidate:

  • 2.4% of Cox’s signatures were incorrectly counted while 1.9% were incorrectly thrown out 
  • 1.7% of Curtis’ signatures were in incorrectly counted while 0.9% were incorrectly thrown out 
  • 1.3% of Brown’s signatures were incorrectly counted while 6.4% were incorrectly thrown out 

Poulter said the reason why Brown had a higher error rate was because there were “more incorrectly invalidated errors in his sample than there were in the other samples.”

“We found seven in his sample, we only found two and three in Congressman Curtis and Governor Cox's samples respectively.”

In his report, Poulter listed two main recommendations to make the signature verifying processes smoother in the future.

1. The Lt. Governor’s Office, which usually oversees this process, should establish an error rate.

Poulter said that would “create a buffer to account for any potential errors that may happen,” which is normal because humans are verifying the signatures and humans make mistakes.

2. Fix the subjective nature of signature verification standards and the signature verification process by establishing clearer definitions. 

Poulter said some of the errors they identified could be due to the “subjective nature” of the signature verification process.

When looking at signature nomination packets, election workers are required to determine “whether they are substantially similar to signatures in the statewide voter registration database.” But when election workers are looking at the signatures on ballot envelopes, they’re “asked to compare them and see if they're reasonably consistent.”

“So there's two different standards that they're asked to use, and neither of these standards is clearly defined or differentiated in statute administrative rules or policy manuals that the [Lt. Governor’s] Office has released,” Poulter said.

“This has led to different assumptions across election workers on how to apply those standards.”

Additionally, Poulter said there should be a post-verification signature audit that includes sending email notifications to those who signed the packets so they can note if it’s fake and have an opportunity to dispute it. He also recommended having a formalized chain of custody for the packets and more training for election workers on signature verification.

Gubernatorial candidate Phil Lyman, who lost the GOP primary election to Cox but is running a write-in campaign, has vocally questioned the signature verification process. He unsuccessfully tried to challenge Cox’s signatures through failed record requests. The State Records Committee ruled they could not provide Lyman with signature records because they are considered classified under Utah law. The Utah Supreme Court also tossed out Lyman’s request to invalidate the primary results.

Ryan Cowley, the state’s elections director, hopes the legislative audit will set the record straight. He said while it found bugs that could be fixed, it did not confirm “the accusations that are out there.”

“They didn't find any signatures that didn't exist. Everybody who they reviewed in these packets was an actual person. They didn't find any fraudulent signatures that were accepted. They didn't find that elected officials verified their own signatures, and they didn't find that any non-Republicans, unregistered residents or other ineligible people had signed these packets,” he said.

“These allegations were not true. They're false.”

Cowley added the Davis County Clerk “properly reviewed in the manner prescribed by law and the processes were followed.” The office, the audit reported, had a 97-98% accuracy rate when it came to verifying valid signatures and a 93-99% accuracy rate for correctly invalidating signatures. To Cowley, that’s “pretty incredible, when you look at a human process that, as is pointed out in this audit, can be a little bit subjective.”

“I think there's a lot of good here in the audit with some good recommendations as to how we can make this process even better,” Cowley said.

“We feel like we do have good processes, but there's always room to grow and improve within the rules that we have in place.”

Saige is a politics reporter and co-host of KUER's State Street politics podcast
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