Attorneys for the Utah elections office want a judge to toss out a lawsuit filed by Phil Lyman and his would-be candidate for lieutenant governor, Layne Bangerter, arguing that a simple reading of Utah’s Constitution shows Bangerter is ineligible to run for Utah’s 2024 gubernatorial election.
“State election officials … cannot be forced to violate their oaths and accept a declaration from a candidate whom they know to be unqualified in violation of the Utah Constitution,” wrote Assistant Attorney General Joseph Adams in a motion filed Thursday morning.
Also on Thursday, 3rd District Judge Matthew Bates scheduled a hearing for Friday afternoon to rule on Lyman’s request that the court stop the printing of ballots for the June primary until the court has decided whether to put Bangerter on the ballot as Lyman’s running mate.
Attorneys for both parties told Bates during Thursday’s hearing that there is some urgency because the ballots need to be sent to the printer by Friday, or possibly Monday at the latest, so the state can have them mailed out to overseas voters by May 10, as required by federal law.
The Utah Constitution states that individuals are ineligible to hold statewide office unless the person “is a qualified voter and has been a resident citizen of the state for five years next preceding the election.”
Lyman’s attorney argues that only means that Bangerter must have lived in the state for at least five years sometime prior to the election. Bangerter lived in the state much of his life but moved to Idaho in 1990 and did not move back to Utah until 2021.
In 2012, in a lawsuit challenging then-Gov. Gary Herbert’s eligibility to be governor, Justice Thomas Lee wrote for a unanimous court that, “to be eligible for the office of Governor, our constitution says that a person must be at least thirty years of age, a qualified voter, and a resident citizen of the state for at least the five preceding years.”
Former Lt. Gov. Greg Bell — handling the issue because Lt. Gov Deidre Henderson, who is over the state elections office, is up for reelection and would have had a conflict of interest in handling the matter — issued an opinion Monday ruling that Bangerter was ineligible.
Despite that, Lyman’s campaign has accused Henderson of “election interference” for rejecting Bangerter’s candidacy.
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