Should Utah ballots count if they arrive in the mail after Election Day?

A proposal to change Utah law so ballots received in the mail after Election Day could no longer be counted was rejected Wednesday by a legislative interim committee.
The “Ballot Counting and Drop Box Amendments” bill would require mailed ballots to be received by elections officials before the polls close on Election Day to be considered valid. Currently, mailed ballots are valid as long as they’re “clearly postmarked before Election Day” and arrive before noon on the day of the official canvass of the vote that usually comes two weeks later.
Under the bill, at least 95% of registered voters would have to be no further than a 60-minute drive from a ballot drop box. Utahns have been voting by mail for more than a decade, a system 75% of Utah voters expressed confidence in, according to a recent Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll conducted by HarrisX.
A motion to favorably recommend the bill presented by Rep. Norm Thurston, R-Provo, to the 2025 Legislature failed to pass the Government Operations Interim Committee after an abbreviated hearing. The decision does not preclude the legislation from being introduced next session.
A similar bill sponsored by Thurston failed to advance in the 2024 Legislature.
Thurston told the committee that issues with late postmarks could have changed the outcome of previous elections, including in Summit County eight years ago as well as in Iron County this year in the close 2nd Congressional District primary race between Rep. Celeste Maloy and her GOP challenger, Colby Jenkins. Maloy ended up winning in a recount by just 176 votes.
“What are we going to do about it? Are we just going to let this keep happening over and over again,” Thurston asked, calling situations such as ballots being mailed in time but postmarked too late to count “a real thing that’s going to continue to happen because people use the mail system to return their ballots.”
What may be “more impactful,” he said, is a recent ruling by a federal appeals court against a Mississippi law allowing mail-in ballots that arrive up to five days after Election Day to be counted if they are postmarked before the election. The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals decision did not take effect immediately and is expected to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Thurston said the bill would “proactively” align Utah with a potential judicial mandate. He said 26 other states already only count ballots received by the time polls close on Election Day, allowing for quicker reporting of results while in Utah, “we still have ballots trickling in for many days after an election.”
According to a map displayed by Thurston, only about 1,500 Utahns statewide live further than 30 miles from the nearest ballot drop box.
Sen. Daniel Thatcher, R-West Valley City, the committee’s co-chairman, voted against endorsing the bill.
“Look, I love the idea that everybody ought to make an effort to vote. At the same time, what if there’s a snowstorm? What if you are disabled? What if you are elderly? What if you are blind? What if you had a stroke? What if you are in the hospital? We have a very effective vote by mail process in the state of Utah that works really, really well,” Thatcher said.
The exception, he said, “in one area where, predictably, we knew there was going to be a problem because we don’t control the U.S. Postal Service.” The issues caused by some ballots being postmarked late due to being processed out of state could be solved through educating voters, Thatcher said.
“At the end of the day, not everybody can take hours to drive to a location and make that drop and then come back, especially if they are in any shape or form impaired,” he said, later describing relying on a postmark as “not perfect, but it’s probably the best option we have for determining what the voter’s intent was.”