This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Utah Republicans are not fond of pluralities. That means they don't like to see an election won by someone who pulled less than an outright majority of ballots cast.

The prospect bothers them enough that they are pushing the Legislature to change the new law governing primary elections in the state so as to stop any candidate from winning a party's nomination with less than a certain percentage of the vote.

Before they get too carried away with that thought, however, leaders of the Utah Republican Party may want to go back and do the math on the election that their national party just won.

Donald Trump is preparing to become president of the United States only because he won pluralities — that is, more than anyone else but less than half of all votes cast — in the handful of the swing states that gave him his surprising Electoral College victory.

If he, or anyone else, were denied a state's electoral votes unless they captured an outright majority in that state, we'd all be looking at run-off balloting in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and, of course, Utah. In each of those states, a top-two run-off against Hillary Clinton, with no Libertarian Party, Green Party or independent candidate on the ticket, could easily flip some or all of those states — and the entire election — to Clinton.

Of course, it could work the other way, too. Clinton's wins in Virginia, New Mexico, Colorado, New Hampshire and Maine were all with shares of between 47.3 percent and 49.9 percent. Top-two run-offs in those states might or might not change the outcome.

But, given all that has come out since the Nov. 8 balloting, it would seem clear that it would be Trump who would be at risk of losing run-offs in the states he carried in multi-party contests. If voters were given a second chance, aware of the fact that Clinton won the popular vote nationally, that a vote for Trump was not going to be a mere protest and that the Republican candidate may have been the beneficiary of Russian hacking, those who voted for anyone else the first time around are likely to be drawn to Clinton on a re-do.

The state of Utah writes, prints, distributes and pays for general election ballots. It has every right to set the rules for how candidates from all parties win that valuable piece of real estate, as long as the rules don't favor one party over the other.

But perhaps Utah Republicans have a point when they worry that multi-candidate primaries in legislative or congressional races could produce marginal candidates who won with only a third of the votes cast.

If that's the concern, then provisions for a run-off when no primary candidate tops, say, 35 percent of the vote might be reasonable. Just as long as the power remains with all registered party members and is not, as some Republicans would like, returned to a party's true-believing core of convention delegates.