Despite the popularity of vote-by-mail in Utah, state lawmakers have attempted to make changes to the system for the last two years. President Donald Trump also thinks mail ballots need an overhaul, and issued an executive order in March to limit the practice because of alleged fraud.
The union representing America’s postal workers is pushing back.
“People should feel good about participating in the election process and confident in knowing that postal workers, our members, are committed to making sure ballots get to the right place,” said longtime postal worker Russ Franklin, president of Salt Lake City Area Local 6 of the American Postal Workers Union.
Starting this week, the American Postal Workers Union is running television ads in Utah encouraging people to use vote-by-mail ahead of the state’s June 23 primary.
The ads will also run in other states where voting by mail is a prevalent option throughout the year in the run-up to the 2026 midterm elections.
With the ultimate fate of Trump’s executive order in legal limbo, Franklin said he recognizes the “tussles” around mail-in voting, but remained skeptical of the practical implications of some of the order’s provisions, in particular, postal workers verifying names on a federal voter list.
“The postal workers will do what the law allows us to do, but verifying whether the people are registered voters or not, the Postal Service doesn't even have the ability to do that based on a piece of mail in front of us,” he said.
Since Utah switched to universal mail ballots in 2018, vote-by-mail has proven incredibly popular. Turnout has significantly increased, and a February report from the Sutherland Institute, a conservative think tank, found 80% of Utahns are confident in the state’s system.
There has been no credible evidence of widespread election fraud in Utah or elsewhere in the U.S. Still, lawmakers in Utah’s Republican supermajority have not been shy about making changes in the name of election security.
Lawmakers passed HB300 in 2025, instituting some big changes. Starting in 2029, instead of automatically receiving a ballot in the mail, voters will have to opt in every eight years. If they don’t, they will have to vote in person. At the same time, voters must also add the last four digits of a valid identification on the ballot along with their signature.
“There is a large constituency that has been afraid that maybe people that aren't citizens are voting, and we need to just tighten that up,” bill sponsor Rep. Jefferson Burton told KUER’s State Street podcast back in March.
To further quell some of those concerns, on May 27, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson released the final version of an extensive audit into Utah’s voter rolls. It found that of over 2 million registered voters in the state, 27 were verifiably noncitizens. Her office removed them from the voter rolls.
The narrative that noncitizens are somehow committing fraud through vote-by-mail doesn’t sit well with Amy Parke, the state postal workers union president. She said after years spent working in corporate America, she’s confident that her colleagues in the Postal Service know what they’re doing.
“This is the first job that I've ever seen such accountability and such loyalty,” she said. “We're not a typical business, because we're a service to the American people, and people take that extremely, extremely serious.”
Her attachment to vote by mail is not just professional, either.
“I have family that live in the middle of Utah, in Fillmore and Meadow, who are not able to get out easily to the polls because they're far away from the cities, so they use vote by mail regularly,” she said. “I also have a disabled mother who lives in Salt Lake City, who actually depends on vote by mail because she is unable to get out and about.”
That rural dynamic has stayed lawmakers’ hands in making further changes. When more were proposed earlier this year, Senate President Stuart Adams said stricter requirements for voting were more feasible in urban areas of the state.
“It's probably easier than in rural areas,” he said at the time.
Even with vote-by-mail under the microscope, both Franklin and Parke said they are not worried about any potential consequences of speaking out.
“Here in Utah, no, we are not concerned about our jobs and doing our jobs, being harassed by anybody who opposes vote-by-mail,” Franklin said. “There are some Utahns that think it's rife with fraud, but there is so little evidence of it that we think it's just a talking point.”
For Parke, she’s “going to do what's right for the American people, for myself, for my family.”
“For me, it's not political. And you know, as those ballots come in, we have no idea who's voting for who or what those ballots say. It's not our concern,” she said. ”We're here to get the mail delivered. We're here to provide the service to the American people. That's our job, and that's what we're here to do.”
Primary ballots go out in the mail the first week of June. Election day is June 23.
