Forensic audit push fizzles in Utah as election officers defend the system
SALT LAKE CITY — Former Rep. Steve Christiansen, a Republican from West Jordan, led a recent charge seeking a “forensic” audit of Utah’s 2020 election along with other election reforms.
This seemed like a bit of a head scratcher since his party’s candidate — former Pres. Donald Trump — won big in Utah, even though he lost to Democrat Joe Biden in the nation’s overall vote count.
On Oct. 21, Christiansen appeared on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast to explain his concerns.
“… for me and for so many others here in Utah, this has much more to do with the Constitution and upholding Constitutional rights than anything else,” Christiansen told Bannon.
Bannon, who served as chief strategist for former Pres. Donald Trump during his first months in the White House, was recently charged with contempt of Congress for failing to respond to a subpoena regarding his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the nation’s Capitol. That day rioters, loyal to Trump, had hoped to prevent Congress from certifying the 2020 votes that placed Joe Biden in the White House.
Christiansen told Bannon he’d been working with “incredible patriots” who shared similar concerns about election security.
“There are hundreds of thousands of people around this state that care deeply about their right to a free and fair election,” Christiansen told Bannon as he described a rally planned for the following day: “They’ve all been invited to come and we’re anticipating a fantastic turnout.”
The Deseret News estimated that roughly 200 people attended Christiansen’s Oct. 20 rally on Utah’s Capitol Hill. Later that same day, Christiansen and two other lawmakers also addressed the Legislature’s Interim Judiciary Committee regarding elections. More than 50 residents spoke out during that session, voicing either support for Utah’s election process or concerns that it had been undermined.
Christiansen also spoke later that week at an Oct. 22-23 WeCANact event held at the Salt Palace. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that less than 1,000 people attended, and conspiracies and half-truths dominated the day.
A few days later, Christiansen resigned from the seat he’d held in the Legislature for less than one year, and also left his job working for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
His Oct. 28 letter of resignation cited attacks on his wife and family as the impetus behind his need to step back from those roles. But Christiansen said he would continue to be a “strong voice for freedom and the protection of families.” Part of that freedom includes the right to reject the Covid-19 vaccine.
Christiansen also wrote that he plans to continue to “educate” people by way of his podcast Restoring Liberty.
Utah Political Underground reached out to Christiansen for comment for this story, but he declined, texting “I intend to stay out of the press for a short time on this topic.”
To date, no evidence of fraud has been found in Utah’s 2020 vote — and nothing significant surfaced nationwide. According to a Reuters fact check, state and federal judges dismissed more than 50 lawsuits filed by Trump and his allies to challenge the 2020 Presidential election.
Even the conservative Heritage Foundation agreed that no fraud surfaced in Utah’s 2020 election. According to its online voter fraud database, it did note false voter registrations that occurred in Daggett County in 2006. Daggett’s population at the time hovered around 900 residents and 31 were found guilty of misdemeanor fraud.
In an Oct. 25 opinion piece published in the Deseret News, Utah’s Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson wrote: “I’m extremely concerned about any public official who deliberately cites pseudo-science and spreads conspiracies, who asks questions not because they seek answers, but wants to score political points by casting doubt on the system. These actions are dangerous and threaten to undermine the very foundations of our constitutional republic.”
In the meantime, Trump continues to maintain that the 2020 election was stolen, an outcome he predicted even before ballots had been cast.
Multiple safeguards
MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell and mathematician Douglas Frank have described ways Utah’s 2020 election — along with other states — had been infiltrated.
Frank had developed an algorithm he believed proved Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Unfortunately, Frank’s math proved fuzzy because it relied on faulty data. But conspiracy fans continue to latch on to it to fuel their mounting mistrust in the system.
Their concerns include the notion that fake voter registrations were injected into the system, voting machines had been hacked and paper ballots miscounted. But Utah election officers say that just didn’t — and couldn’t happen.
Longtime Salt Lake County Clerk Sherrie Swensen described the many safeguards built into their system, from start to finish.
- Online and paper voter registration forms must contain either the last four digits of the individual’s social security number or their Utah Driver’s License number. That identification gets verified by a statewide database.
- Once verified, the voter is mailed a voter ID card to the address listed on the registration form. If the Post Office can’t deliver the card to that address, it gets returned and marked as inactive so that no paper ballots get sent to that address.
- Vote by mail ballots get ordered for active voters only, and each one contains a unique ballot ID number that correlates to the voter registration record in the state database.
- The ballot’s return envelope has a tab that covers the voter’s required signature affidavit. That signature gets checked by machine and/or by hand to match to the voter’s signature on record.
- Voters who either didn’t sign the affidavit or had signatures that didn’t match will receive a “cure letter” notifying them that their ballots have been rejected. They then have the opportunity to provide another signed affidavit along with the last four digits of their social security number or their drivers license number. Then their ballots can be counted.
- Addresses get updated frequently as voters move around. But if a voter submits their new address after ballots have already been ordered, the previous ballot is “spoiled” and the system only counts the new one.
- The statewide database prevents voters from casting in-person ballots in addition to their vote by mail ballot.
- Prior to each election, all scanners and voting machines undergo Logic and Accuracy tests.to make sure the software is tabulating correctly.
- During post-election canvassing, audits of both paper and machine-cast ballots take place. Utah’s voting machines provide a paper trail, and random machines are selected to hand-count votes to make sure the paper trail count matches the machine count. They consistently have.
- Utah law provides a 40-day window following an election in which to file a court challenge to contest any race.
“People don’t understand the rigors and lengths that we go to,” Swensen said. “Before the November election, we also had the Department of Homeland Security come in and do an assessment to make sure there’s nothing connected to the internet, nothing can be hacked, that everything is secure.”
Swensen said that Christiansen toured Salt Lake County’s election center with Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson earlier this fall.
“He told me he trusts what we do. But he also said he had questions,” Swensen said. Christiansen proceeded to show her a Mike Lindell video where someone supposedly injected voter registration numbers into the system.
“They used numbers from voter registration lists they obtained many months after the November 2020 Election,” Swensen said. “Their allegation was that ballots were inserted into our systems … in Weber, Salt Lake, Davis and Utah Counties because turnout was higher than the number of voters on their lists.”
The voter registration list — acquired months after the 2020 vote — would differ for several reasons, Swensen said. For one thing, some voters requested that their names be withheld from such lists, which is allowed by state law. Also, names of inactive voters along with names of people who moved elsewhere had been deleted. So the numbers would not match up.
But the bottom line, Swensen said, is that “No one can insert artificial or fake ballots into our system” because the statewide database requires correlating every ballot to a registered voter record.
“If a ballot came in without the barcode (reflecting the unique ballot ID number and voter ID number), it would automatically be rejected,” Swensen said.
Forensic Audit?
According to voteinfo.utah.gov, 459,824 ballots were processed in Salt Lake County in November 2020.
Swensen said they received about 85 form letters plus a few postcards and perhaps 10 emails from people seeking a so-called forensic audit of that election.
When comparing the number of votes cast to the number of audit requests, Swensen said “It certainly doesn’t constitute a mandate.”
In Weber County, Clerk Auditor Ricky Hatch said his elections office received only two such requests.
Swensen also pointed out that state statute lacks both a definition and any kind of process for a forensic audit.
Also, federal law requires states to lock ballots away for 22 months as soon as the 40-day window in which someone can challenge the election has closed.
“So this idea that all of a sudden we should start unwrapping our secured ballots and throw them out there for an outside group to come in and do a forensic audit — there’s no description in law by which that could be done,” Swensen said.
Looking ahead
In addition to overseeing Weber County elections, Hatch also chairs the elections subcommittee for the National Association of Counties.
Wearing that hat, he addressed the House Administration Committee in February regarding the “For the People Act” currently before Congress. He expressed misgivings about passing broad brush election reform.
“States and counties are unique and different in how we administer elections,” Hatch said. “I urged them to be very cautious in developing any federal policy over elections because of that reason. What works in New Jersey may very well not work in Utah.”
Hatch acknowledged that counties lack leeway to do less than what state and federal election laws require — but they can add extra controls as they see fit.
Clerks routinely scrutinize their processes for risks and safeguards, Hatch added.
“And we have some suggestions for improvement,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean there are gaping holes that are going to let Venezuela, China or Russia run a truck through.”
Weber County switched to all vote by mail in 2015, having had a trial run with the process during a 2013 special election for a countywide library bond.
But continued disinformation about vote by mail has convinced him of the need for outreach and education about how it actually works — and why it can be trusted.
“We’re good event planners and good control specialists. But we’re really not very good PR people. That’s just not our bailiwick,” Hatch said. “Really the most effective outreach tool we have is touring our office.”
But tours take time — and Hatch said it’s hard to duplicate that experience online.
“We’re looking at ways we can do that,” Hatch said, “and have requested extra budget funding to address this need for outreach.”
The need to educate the public will likely grow if Trump continues to falsely assert that the 2020 election was stolen through widespread fraud.
“I do feel that he’s spreading disinformation … because many of the things he says are either too vague to be corroborated or simply cannot be corroborated with credible research, and in fact have been refuted with credible research,” Hatch said. “That’s just harmful for everybody.”
And perhaps enough is finally enough.
“At a certain point we have to say we’ve looked under this rock, we haven’t seen anything yet, it’s now a year later,” Hatch said. “Let’s move on. Let’s continue to improve. But it’s time to stop looking backwards.”
