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Willis Begay is a busy guy.
When I spoke to him last week, he was operating heavy equipment in St. George. Sometimes he works as a painter and sandblaster. And his job as a mechanical boilermaker will often take him all across the state and the country.
He usually makes it home for the weekend, but other times he just has to stay until the job is done.
With an unpredictable schedule and lots of travel, it has been convenient for him to be able to vote by mail when elections roll around.
And as president of the Oljato Chapter of the Navajo Nation, he knows he’s not alone.
“It’s not like we have ballot [boxes] on every corner,” he said. “Out here, you have to drive like maybe 20 or 50 miles” to vote in person.
But that would be the situation he and others would face if his representative, Phil Lyman, succeeds in passing sweeping changes to Utah’s election law.
Lyman’s HB371 would eliminate mail-in voting in favor of in-person ballots on Election Day. In limited circumstances where absentee ballots are allowed, a voter would have to include a copy of their voter identification card.
It makes a series of other changes — audits would be required if federal or gubernatorial candidates finish within 15 points of each other; cameras would be installed in vote-counting sites; images of ballots would need to be posted online for at least a year so any member of the public can count them.
Naturally, all of this stems from his misguided belief that widespread voter fraud turned the election against his guy, Donald Trump — who pardoned Lyman for his conviction in a 2014 ATV protest.
Lyman claims to have proof of “anomalies” in Utah’s election but would not share them when asked by my colleague, Bryan Schott.
Lyman has been a supporter of former Rep. Steve Christiansen, who touted outlandish conspiracy theories that voting machines nationwide were programmed with an algorithm to dictate the outcomes and that scores of thousands of ballots phantom voters were counted in Utah — that’s a lot of effort to rig an election in a state that didn’t matter.
If there are security concerns, the legislative auditors are currently reviewing Utah’s election processes. Instead of waiting for that work, Lyman and others are plunging ahead without the facts,
But here’s the worst part: While the bill doesn’t solve any actual problems — none that really exist, at least — Lyman’s bill, if it passes, would make things much harder for his own constituents.
That’s because Lyman has the largest, most dispersed House district in the state. It spans all or parts of seven counties and takes 4 1/2 hours to drive across it. Given how spread out and rural the district is, you might think these Utahns are exactly the people — people like Begay — who would benefit the most from being able to vote by mail.
And you’d be right.
From 2012 (the last presidential election without vote-by-mail) to the most recent election in 2020, voter turnout increased across the district, in some areas significantly. Turnout in Garfield County increased nearly 12% in that span; in Wayne County, it went up 18% and in San Juan County, where Lyman lives, it increased 20% — the third-highest increase in the state during that span.
Lyman’s constituents have benefited from being able to vote by mail, meaning more Utahns have a voice in their government and they have done it without any proof of fraud. Maybe that’s the problem Lyman is trying to solve?
The disenfranchisement would be particularly harmful to Navajo voters who for years faced harder obstacles and outright racial gerrymandering, which was only remedied when federal courts intervened to protect their right to vote. Lyman’s bill would be a giant step backward for them.
“It would make a big impact,” Begay said of the potential for losing mail-in voting. “This is one of the big concerns I have for my people. …. We’re like the last people they want to help out.”
Lyman’s bill is awaiting a hearing before a House committee, possibly this week and it needs to be defeated resoundingly. Because our goal in running elections should be to make voting easy and secure. This bill does neither of those things and disproportionately harms the same rural voters Lyman represents — or is supposed to represent.