Utah’s elections office has not been able to confirm any cases of noncitizens voting in elections as it nears completing a review of voter rolls, while GOP lawmakers move forward with a bill that would require Utahns to provide documentary proof of citizenship to participate in state elections.
After spending months reviewing 2.1 million people on Utah’s voter rolls, the lieutenant governor has not found a single instance of a noncitizen voting in the state and only one instance of an ineligible individual registering to vote.
It is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in state and federal elections, and county clerks check Utahns’ driver license or ID number, or the last four digits of their Social Security number to verify citizenship before registering someone to vote. Voters are also required to sign an affidavit certifying they are citizens.
“We have not yet encountered anyone who voted illegally,” Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, who oversees Utah’s elections, said of her office’s review of the state’s voter file.
The review — which has included comparing voter data to state and federal records — is still ongoing. Henderson said there were 486 registered voters whose information on file was either incomplete or inaccurate, which could be due to typos, or a missing driver license or Social Security number.
About a third of the 486 voters registered decades ago, before the state required a driver license or Social Security number to register. All 486 of the flagged individuals have been sent letters asking them to re-register or to provide additional information, and 52 have done so.
“I anticipate that the vast majority of these 486 are in fact citizens and just need to update their information,” Henderson said.
In the worst case, assuming all of those yet-to-be-verified registrations belong to noncitizens, the error rate for the rolls would be 0.02%.
Four additional noncitizens were identified as having registered to vote before the lieutenant governor’s review began, due to a programming error in the state’s system for voters to use when they were getting their driver licenses that allowed people to register without first verifying their citizenship.
The loophole was fixed before the review started and those four were removed from the rolls and have been turned over to the county clerks for further investigation. It is unknown if they voted.
(Tess Crowley | Pool) Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, center, listens as Gov. Spencer Cox delivers his 2026 State of the State address in the House chamber at the Capitol in Salt Lake City on Thursday, Jan. 22, 2026.
Voter ID bill advances
The preliminary findings of the voter roll review comes as a bill from Rep. Cory Maloy, R-Lehi, requiring voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship before being allowed to cast a ballot in state elections advances through the Legislature.
If a Utah driver license or ID verifies citizenship, those numbers can serve as voters’ proof, as well as numbers from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, tribal treaty or tribal enrollment cards. Other documents that would qualify under the bill include birth certificates, a certificate of a degree of “Indian” blood or BIA birth affidavit, a U.S. passport or U.S. naturalization documents.
Utahns would have to provide that proof of citizenship when registering to vote or before voting in this November’s elections. Most Utahns have already provided that documentary proof by including their Utah driver license or ID number in their voter registration.
The requirements would only determine eligibility in elections for state offices, not federal, to comply with federal laws meant to prevent voter suppression. Voters who do not meet documentation specifications would receive a separate ballot listing only federal races.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Rep. Cory Maloy, R-Lehi, at a meeting of the House Business and Labor Committee at the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2024.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, five other states have passed laws requiring documentary proof of citizenship to vote — and some of those laws face ongoing legal challenges.
Utah’s U.S. Sen. Mike Lee has proposed a stricter voter ID bill, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, at the federal level. Henderson announced the audit on X last year as Lee’s bill drew public attention.
Henderson said her office started by looking at all 2.1 million individuals in the state’s voter database and comparing them against the driver license database or by comparing the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number to that on file.
That process validated 99.5% the citizenship of the registered voters. The remaining 71,000 were compared against a federal database used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which Henderson said is touted as “the silver bullet for verifying citizenship.”
“It isn’t. It is not,” Henderson said of the federal database. While the collection of data can confirm someone is a citizen, she said, it cannot be used to definitively say someone in the database is not a citizen.
Henderson said it has been a labor-intensive process but one she said she wanted to make sure was done right.
“We don’t want any ineligible people on the rolls, but we also don’t want to kick people off the rolls who are eligible,” Henderson said.
If dragnets are too wide, she said, inappropriately conducted audits can disenfranchise people, violating state and federal elections laws.
Henderson said that very thing happened to her. Heading into the 2022 election, she said, everyone in her house had received their ballots except her, so she asked staff to check if the clerk had mailed her ballot yet.
She learned that the Utah County clerk at the time had flagged her registration because she was born in the Netherlands when her father was serving in the U.S. Air Force and the clerk had decided to remove anyone born outside of the U.S. from the voter rolls.
On Wednesday, Maloy’s voter identification bill was approved by a House committee and is now awaiting debate on the House floor.
Representatives of the lieutenant governor’s office spoke in support of the bill during a committee hearing Wednesday, saying it would give election administrators a mechanism to prevent voters from casting a ballot in state elections if their citizenship cannot be verified.
“We share a common goal with the Legislature of ensuring that only U.S. citizens are able to vote in our elections, and in order to achieve that outcome, our goal is to establish best practices that allow for an effective way to verify citizenship without placing a significant burden on voters or unintentionally removing those who are eligible,” Elections Coordinator Cambria Cantrell told the House committee.
House Speaker Mike Schultz told reporters on Tuesday that Republican lawmakers are “excited about” the legislation. Even though it’s illegal for noncitizens to vote, Schultz said, he believes it is still happening, although he isn’t sure how widespread the problem is.
“Is it in the thousands? I’ve been told, probably not. Is it in the hundreds? Probably somewhere in there,” he said. “But you have close elections every year, so I think it’s important to have transparency.”
Note to readers, 12 p.m. • This story has been updated to clarify that the lieutenant governor’s officer is conducting a review and to add additional context.