After ballot drop boxes were set on fire in Washington and Oregon this week, some Utah counties are stepping up security measures ahead of Election Day.
Summit County Clerk Eve Furse said it “breaks my heart” to hear that hundreds of ballots were destroyed because “all [election workers] want to do is count those votes.”
In response, Summit County has beefed up its ballot security. More patrols from the sheriff's department have been added and she said ballots will be picked up “more frequently just to try and limit the damage, should any damage occur.”
Furse said no one has ever tried to destroy ballots in the county, but she encouraged anyone who sees suspicious behavior to report it to the police.
In 2022, Utah lawmakers passed a sweeping election security bill that included ballot chain of custody changes, along with video surveillance and security measures at ballot drop boxes.
Republican Rep. Jon Hawkins co-sponsored that bill and said anyone who carries out election interference is “afraid of the results.”
“And that's not how we operate in the United States.”
Still, Davis County Clerk Brian McKenzie said his office is also prepared for any unfortunate circumstances — including drop box fires.
“That threat is not new to us,” he said. “Our drop boxes are designed to where they limit the size of objects that can be entered into them to help prevent those kinds of things.”
Many drop boxes across Utah are also equipped with fire suppressants and are bolted to the ground to guard against any potential tampering.
Contingency plans are also in place if ballots are destroyed. In order to create a strict chain of custody, McKenzie said two election workers must be present to pick up ballots. The date and time of the pickup is also logged.
“Because in the worst case scenario, if something were to have happened to a drop box and ballots were destroyed to a point where we would be unable to identify who they belong to, knowing the last date and time the ballots were retrieved from that box is going to be critical,” he said. “That's where we can communicate to our voters and say, ‘Hey, look, between this time and this time, if your ballots were delivered at that time, then your ballots have been destroyed and we can get them replaced.’”
If ballots are destroyed, those voters would then be notified that they would have to vote in person on Election Day.
“We have methods in place to safeguard those in the case that a worst-case scenario happens.”
Despite pushing forward a ballot security law in 2022, Hawkins said the incidents in Oregon and Washington did not bring him any vindication. The security measures he helped write were more focused on voter fraud and he “wasn't thinking that drop boxes would be burnt to the ground.”
“We'd heard a lot about ballot stuffing, you know, the idea that one person can place 40 different ballots in a drop box, or in a mailbox or whatever,” he said.
“We were just trying to make sure that that kind of activity wasn't happening and so, you know, but burning a ballot box, that's something that never even crossed my mind.”
