“Mister chair, may I pass out some material to the committee?” Rep. Jefferson Burton, the lawmaker carrying the key election reform bill pushed by GOP leaders in the Utah House of Representatives, asked before a Senate hearing on his proposal.
The top of the flyer said, “Heritage Foundation Election Security Scorecard,” and in bold text told lawmakers — a supermajority of whom are Republican — “Currently, Utah ranks 33rd out of 50 for election security. Implementing these changes will raise our ranking to 9th overall.”
Burton’s handout, images of which were obtained by The Salt Lake Tribune, listed 11 ways the House majority was seeking to change Utah’s elections. Several of them were wrapped into his bill, “Amendments to Election Law,” or HB300.
Senate Business and Labor Committee Chair Evan Vickers, R-Cedar City, interjected as Burton explained the bill, “What exactly is The Heritage Foundation?”
“The Heritage Foundation is one of those organizations that look at election integrity and security, and they’re one that we have referred to,” Burton responded. “I’ve got several letters from them supporting the bill.”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Rep. Jefferson Burton, R-Salem, at the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, March 4, 2025.
The Heritage Foundation does have materials on its website “assessing the status of state laws needed for election fairness and security.” But that’s not what the organization is most widely known for.
In the months before President Donald Trump was elected for a second time, The Heritage Foundation oversaw the drafting and published the controversial Project 2025 playbook in anticipation of his victory.
Endorsed by Utah’s U.S. Sen. Mike Lee as a “blueprint” to “dismantle the administrative state and return power back to the states and the American people,” critics have said it would push America toward authoritarianism. Although Trump disavowed the plan on the campaign trail, he has since appointed many of its architects to key positions and has begun adopting some of its proposals.
While pushing for an end to Utah’s universal vote-by-mail election system, state lawmakers — including House Speaker Mike Schultz — have repeatedly relied on The Heritage Foundation’s policy perspectives, referencing them in public debate, interviews, promotional materials and social media posts.
Utah is one of eight states, the majority of which are in the expansive American West, that hold universal vote-by-mail elections. While Utah is the only solid red state of the bunch, it is also joined by Nevada — a swing state Trump won in November that is currently led by a Republican governor.
Nathan Duell, a regional director for the organization’s lobbying arm Heritage Action for America, did not respond to a request for an interview.
Ahead of the Senate committee hearing for the bill, however, he posted to X, “H.B. 300 makes significant improvements to secure Utah’s elections with expanding Voter ID and ensuring only citizens register to vote. @Heritage_Action commends the Utah House for passing H.B. 300 and urges the Senate to support this important bill.”
An account for Heritage Action quoted the post from Duell, who is registered to lobby in Utah, saying the bill “makes it easier to vote and harder to cheat,” with the flexed bicep emoji tacked onto the end.
‘A leader in voting access’
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) An overhead camera monitors a ballot drop box at Taylorsville City Hall, Friday, Nov. 4, 2022.
Speaking to a House committee over Zoom, National Vote at Home Institute head Barbara Smith Warner pointed to the Heritage Foundation’s “Election Fraud Map,” last updated in February.
Among all states, Utah is on the low end of the spectrum for “proven instances of election fraud” that the map captures, with three from 2008 — four years before the Utah Legislature passed a law allowing counties to conduct elections entirely by mail.
“I urge you to … maintain Utah’s place as a leader in voting access and democracy,” Smith Warner told representatives on the House Government Operations Committee.
In the first iteration of the bill published in January, active voters would have continued receiving ballots in the mail but would have returned them in person and shown an ID. They would have been able to apply for an exception to that by visiting a county clerk’s office, where their ID would be inspected.
County clerks, the elected officials who administer elections in Utah, opposed that version of the bill over concerns about how it might impact their offices’ budgets, their ability to do their job and voter participation.
Referring members of the Senate Business and Labor Committee to his handout, Burton said, “Essentially, [The Heritage Foundation] look at states that have vote by mail and they look to see if they actually have an identification component with the vote by mail. So those are the points that come from what we’ve done by the provisions in this bill.”
House Speaker Mike Schultz championed the bill as a way to restore trust in Utah’s elections, pointing to an audit of the 2024 election that found two “likely deceased” Utahns voted in 2023 municipal elections and three people seemingly voted twice. Auditors also said that they found no evidence of significant fraud.
None of the auditors’ recommendations included reassessing or throwing out vote by mail. Instead, they largely focused on better reconciliation — a tracking and verification process — of ballots sent in the mail, as well as improving maintenance of voter rolls.
And a 2024 poll by the Utah-based conservative think tank Sutherland Institute found that Utahns by and large do trust the state’s elections, with 87% saying they are “very confident” or “somewhat confident” in ballot count accuracy.
After last year’s primary elections, The Tribune found that among the 26 counties that provided voting method data, 96.7% of Utahns who voted used the ballot sent to their mailbox.
Democrats in the Legislature have raised questions about Republicans’ approach to reforming elections, criticizing it as a solution looking for a problem that would make it more difficult for marginalized communities — especially Native Americans and those with disabilities — to vote.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Election workers sort vote-by-mail ballots at the Salt Lake County ballot processing center on Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2022.
After weeks of negotiations with election officials and the Senate, which frequently acted as a moderating force on House proposals this session, by late February the bill had evolved to make the requirements for participating in an election by mail significantly less burdensome. Among the key changes would be a move toward relying on the last four digits of a driver’s license or ID number, rather than a signature, to verify a mail-in ballot.
But as the bill left the Senate it still moved toward ending universal vote by mail in the Beehive State, requiring Utahns to opt in to getting a ballot through the mail every eight years starting in 2029.
When Senate floor sponsor Sen. Mike McKell, who holds a position in majority leadership, presented the bill to his colleagues, he did not reference the Heritage Foundation nor its election policy ratings.
“There is concern with security of elections, and that doesn’t need to conflict with having a good election system, and that doesn’t need to conflict with vote by mail,” McKell said.
A nationwide push from the right
One of the criteria for which The Heritage Foundation scores Utah low on its “Election Integrity Scorecard” is “Absentee Ballot Management.”
Utah, the right-wing advocacy organization says, reduces election integrity by mailing absentee ballots to all registered voters, allowing a permanent absentee ballot list and not requiring a signed voter request for an absentee ballot.
The states that The Heritage Foundation awards the highest scores are mostly clustered in the Deep South, and are where voter turnout tends to be lowest.
A Salt Lake County resident who gave public comment on the bill, Esmeralda Ramirez, told lawmakers she did not trust the intentions behind it, and added, “Your Heritage Foundation endorsement makes me trust it even less.”
Charles Stewart III, the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Election Data and Science Lab, said in an interview that The Heritage Foundation’s Election Integrity Scorecard is one of multiple policy rating systems “driven by beliefs among people on the right and the left that these reforms reflect either ideologically or practically what they believe a well-run election is.”
His lab has its own way of assessing election systems, largely driven instead by election outcomes rather than policy preferences with criteria developed by an advisory committee of both Republicans and Democrats, called the Elections Performance Index.
On MIT’s scale, Utah ranks 30th out of 50, with its rating pushed down in part by worse than the national average voter registration rate and voter turnout, a measure vote by mail was intended to — and has — improved. Until Utah puts HB300’s policies into practice, it won’t be clear how it affects the state’s position on that index.
“There now is a pretty organized effort to have more Republican states pass a set of bills similar to what Utah is considering, and apparently is about to see signed into law,” Stewart said.
“But on the other hand,” Stewart added, the version of the bill that was sent to the governor’s desk for a signature, “I would say is a kind of a mild version of some of these bills.”
Gov. Spencer Cox will likely sign the bill, which he called “brilliant” in a news conference Friday.
“Lots of people wrongly believe that we have mass fraud in our elections, and it’s just not true, but we need to restore trust to them as well,” Cox, a Republican, said.
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Gov. Spencer Cox speaks during a press conference on the last day of the legislative session at the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City on Friday, March 7, 2025.
In his final meeting with reporters during the 2025 session, Schultz said he would have liked to have seen a more intact version of it pass.
“Would I like to see it different?” Schultz asked. “I absolutely would. Is it better than what we currently have? I truly believe that it is. Will there need to be details worked out in the coming years? That’s why we have until 2029 before it fully gets implemented.”
In the four years leading up to the next presidential election, Schultz said lawmakers will likely revisit some of the details of the bill.
“The bill that got passed is certainly moving Utah’s election laws in a rightward direction,” Stewart said.
But, he continued, it’s “an interesting compromise between a probably very strong sense among the activists on the right that voting by mail is really wrong and everybody should be voting in person on the same day, versus the experience of a lot of voters, and the experience of the election officials who now know how to run elections in the current Utah way.”
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