Utah governor would not support ending mail voting

State of play: Cox said he would support closing the amount of time Utahns have to cast their mail ballots to allow county clerks to process votes earlier.

What they're saying: "I don't think we need to eliminate mail-in voting, but we should always be doing more to make it more secure," he said during his monthly news conference in Salt Lake City.

• "If you don't send it in by [a certain] date, then you have to come in and and vote in person or deliver it in person," he said. "I do think we can limit the scope of mail-in voting in a way that adds trust to the system."

The big picture: Election audits in recent weeks have prompted legislative leaders, including House Speaker Mike Schultz and Senate President Stuart Adams, to express concerns about the integrity of mail voting.

• Meanwhile, Democrats fear that these audits will fuel action to overhaul mail voting this upcoming legislative session.

Zoom in: A legislative audit released this month into the state's election system found no "significant fraud," but it did find that 1,400 deceased voters had not been cleared from voter rolls, Utah News Dispatch reported.

By the numbers: A 2022 Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politic poll found that Utah's Republicans (88%) and Democrats (91%) were almost equal in their trust in the state's elections.

• That confidence dipped among Democrats in the weeks following the 2024 election. About 70% of Democrats said state government officials conducted a "fair and accurate election," per a Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll released this week.

Flashback: Utah started allowing counties the option send out ballots to voters over a decade ago, in an effort to serve rural voters who lived too far from polling locations.

• Efforts to end mail voting in the state have been introduced in the past, but have not succeeded.