March 28, 2025 12:36 PM UTC

Utah Quietly Ditches All-Mail Ballot Elections To Appease Trump

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Salt Lake Tribune reports, this week our conservative western neighbors led by the Beehive State’s congenial Republican Gov. Spencer Cox quietly made a big change to their election system, against the overwhelming popular support for mail ballots but in keeping with the desire of President Donald Trump to do away with a form of voting he has insisted for years without evidence was responsible for his 2020 election defeat:

Tucked in the middle of a list of 100 bills Gov. Spencer Cox signed Thursday was “Amendments to Election Law,” or HB300 — the law that is set to end Utah’s popular universal vote-by-mail election system, forcing voters to opt in before 2029 to receive and send a ballot through the mail.

The governor did not include a comment on his decision to sign the bill in the news release, as he has for some other bills.

An initial version of the bill would have effectively eliminated Utahns’ option to vote via the postal service altogether, but the version Cox ultimately signed allows voters to opt in to participating in elections through the mail. Utahns must opt in before 2029, when counties will stop sending ballots to every voter’s mailbox.

Before this change, as NPR reports, the state of Utah enjoyed a unique status among red states as the only all-mail ballot state in the bunch:

Before the bill was signed, Utah was one of eight states, plus Washington, D.C., that automatically sent mail ballots to eligible voters. Utah was also the only fully Republican-led state to have such a program. [Pols emphasis]

Voters will still be able to vote by mail, but starting in 2029 they will have to request a ballot. Voters will also be required to provide identifying information on their ballot, if they decide to mail it back or drop it off at a ballot box.

There was no popular push to do away with all-mail ballot elections in Utah, where over 95% of voters happily utilized the system to cast their vote last year. There was no identified misuse of the system to justify moving back to a by-request mail ballot system.

The only reason this is happening is that Utah is a red state, and Donald Trump doesn’t like mail ballots.

In Colorado, where mail ballots led to nation-beating rates of voter participation, the threat is not from within but rather from Trump’s controversial executive order this week demanding a host of changes to state policies on voter registration, mail ballot deadlines, and a variety of other solutions in search of problems that would all have the net effect of reducing voter participation. Trump’s order is expected to head immediately to court for costly litigation with the states, a strategy considered an end unto itself regardless of the outcome–“lawfare” by the federal government against states that don’t immediately give in. Expect Colorado to be part of that case in defense of our election system, just like we have been fighting back against Trump’s mass layoffs, freezing federal funding, and unconstitutionally redefining “birthright citizenship.”

The state of Utah is now a cautionary tale for what happens when there’s no one to fight back.