'Fear sells. Facts are boring:' Utah Lt. Gov. Henderson defends election security
by Lori Prichard ksl · KSL.comKEY TAKEAWAYS
- Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson defends Utah's election security amid misinformation challenges.
- She emphasizes mail-in voting's role in maintaining accurate voter rolls.
- Henderson questions DOJ's motives in seeking voter data, citing privacy concerns.
SALT LAKE CITY – Utah's top elections official, Lt. Governor Deidre Henderson, said maintaining trust in voting has become one of the more difficult parts of her job, as misinformation, new laws and legal challenges collide.
Henderson, who is responsible for overseeing elections in the state, said public confidence is increasingly being tested despite what she describes as a secure and well-managed system.
"Fear sells. Facts are boring," Henderson said. "And that has been the biggest challenge of my office."
Henderson pointed to the rapid spread of misinformation as a major factor. In reality, she said, "rigging" an election is incredibly difficult.
"It's very hard to manipulate that kind of system to affect a change in an election outcome," she said. "But it's easy to take little pieces of information here or there and create false narratives out of it."
In the last five years, she said, Utah lawmakers have passed at least 86 election-related laws. Measures, such as HB313 passed in 2022, focus on strengthening ballot security and protecting drop boxes. Others, such as SB17, passed in 2023, amended state residency requirements and outlined voting provisions.
Henderson said many changes have improved the system, but not all are necessary.
"Changes for the sake of changes are sometimes not very helpful," she said.
Utah has long stood out among Republican-led states for its widespread use of vote-by-mail, a system Henderson strongly supports and defends as secure. She argued that mail-in voting not only increases engagement but also helps maintain accurate voter rolls by requiring counties to update registration data weekly, if not daily.
"I think that vote by mail in general makes states have much cleaner voting lists than if you have only in-person," she said. "If you have only in-person, there's really no incentive to clean off people who moved or died because people show up with their ID and they vote in-person and that's that."
A recent state citizenship review underscores her point: 99% percent of Utah voters are verified U.S. citizens. Her office did find one confirmed noncitizen, but said that person never cast a ballot in an election and has since been removed from voter rolls.
Despite overwhelming data showing that vote-by-mail is secure, it has faced growing criticism within the Republican Party, including from President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly raised concerns.
"The cheating in mail-in voting is legendary," President Trump said in the Oval Office in March.
"I think there is a narrative that the manner in which someone votes somehow has an effect on the outcome of an election," Henderson said. "We have seen that is not true."
"It's politically rewarded to toe the line and undermine people's confidence in our elections," she said.
There has been a push to make voter information much more available in Utah than in previous years. Passed in 2026, SB153 made changes to voter privacy laws by scaling back who can claim privacy protections, the type of information that is public and who can request it.
"I feel like the legislature gave some really generous privacy protections for individuals, allowing individuals to opt in to those privacy protections. And now, the legislature has decided most people no longer should be allowed to have those privacy protections," Henderson said. "I think this law is ambiguous. It puts clerks in a tough spot."
Henderson said her office advised lawmakers about potential challenges before the bill passed, particularly the lack of an appeals process should a voter request protected status from their county clerk and is subsequently denied.
"We're seeing where the law maybe didn't quite capture enough people who might need to be put into that at-risk category," she said.
Henderson's concerns come as she is also facing a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice, which is seeking access to detailed voter information.
She said the DOJ's request raises red flags about privacy and data security.
"When you have someone's date of birth, driver's license (and) Social Security number, that's the holy trinity of identity theft," she said.
She also questioned the federal government's motives, noting that much of the information is already in federal databases.
"It seems like they're trying to get this data for a different reason than the reason that they're telling us," she said. "If the federal government already has all of this information. Why are they suing 30 states to get it?"
Henderson admitted building and maintaining trust requires transparency, but questioned: At what cost?
"You can't build something by destroying it," she said. "Little things add up, little things make a difference, and you know what? People in Utah do trust our elections."
Henderson encouraged Utahns who have doubts about the state's voting system and whether it's secure to see it for themselves.
"I encourage them to get off social media and go volunteer for their county clerk," she said. "I have seen over the years that people who have gotten involved, who have been doubters, have come out the other side true believers."
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
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Lori Prichard