The underlying tenant of our democracy is that everyone has a vote. Yet fewer people are showing up at the polls. Some people are beginning to think our laws are partly to blame and it’s prompted an initiative called ‘Count My Vote’ which has been making waves, with the potential to change Utah’s election laws in the not too distant future.
Count my vote is trying to initiate a law so they are collecting signatures; they need to collect 100,000 signatures In 26 of 29 senate districts so you will probably see them out now in different areas of the state.
Currently a candidate files a declaration of candidacy with the county clerk’s office, and if they are affiliated with a political party they move into that party’s caucus system. The Caucuses are made up of neighborhoods or precincts who select delegates. Those delegates are involved in meeting with candidates and are sent as representatives to the state or the county conventions where candidates are selected. In this case if the candidate receives a majority of the votes from the delegates beyond a certain threshold they move on to the general election and a primary isn’t necessary. The ‘Count my Vote’ initiative seeks to do away with caucuses and instead requires a candidate to collect signatures of at least 2% of the registered voters in their party relative to the size of the office they are running for, to become nominated for the primary election. Then a Primary election would take place to select the candidates who would then run in the general election.
The signatures for the initiative are due by April 15th to make it a law. Opponents then have until May 15 to submit signatures of people who want to withdraw from the count my vote petition.
Once the county clerks reach may 15th they are required to send us all of the numbers for these petitions and we will go through all the petitions right here on this table we will probably have a stack and large boxes and we start counting up all of the numbers and we get the grand total, and so the lieutenant governor will then announce that the petition was sufficient, or insufficient. If it’s sufficient then it’s going to go on to the general election ballot in November, and there’s a process and procedures to get to that point too including coming up with a ballot title.
The signatures that candidates would need to collect to run in the primaries would then be verified by the county clerk. This extra step poses some challenges for the county clerk’s office.
It’s a manual process so each signature is compared to the signature the person used when they registered to vote.
It does make a cost increase for two reasons: first candidates are now submitting a petition, for governor they are going to have to have at least 13,000 signatures probably a 1/3 more than that to ensure they get 13,000 registered voters. And that’s just for one candidate.
We figure each one of those signatures will take anywhere from 30 sec to a minute to go through and verify that’s kind of our average time.
You can kind of calculate that out and figure out how much time that would take in man hours for our staff to handle that, so there is a fiscal impact on the county clerks to go through and verify those signatures.
More candidates and more voter participation do create the need for more resources in order to run the election, which will push the clerk’s office each election cycle. But in either scenario the county clerks are willing to do what is necessary to carry out an election according to the law.
– The County Seat CSEP407 (1 of 3)
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