SALT LAKE CITY — Republican candidate for governor Phil Lyman has announced his campaign will formally contest the results of the 2024 primary election.
Lyman, who lost the primary to Governor Spencer Cox, posted on X that he and his campaign would formally contest the election and demand "election returns, including cast vote records (CVR), tabulator information, ballot images, tabulator tapes, and back up project databases, for all 29 Utah counties. No such information has been provided to the campaign by any county, and as such, the election has not been verified and must be contested."
"The Lt Governor has advised the counties to not provide these records," Lyman wrote. “We believe that there are votes recorded in the various counties that would not stand up to a verification process. We cannot perform the verification process without access to these very basic records, none of which disclose personally identifiable information."
Election returns show Lyman lost by 37,525 votes to Cox in the GOP primary.
It follows a ruling by a judge against Lyman in his demand to challenge the election results. In the spring, Lyman won the state GOP convention nomination, but lost the GOP primary to Cox, who gathered signatures to earn a spot on the ballot.
Lyman's campaign filed public records requests to inspect those signatures in what appears to be an effort to challenge them. After his requests were denied citing Utah laws on voter information privacy, he filed a lawsuit. Lyman went to court earlier this week to seek an injunction to force the state to hand over the signatures of not only Cox's campaign, but also those of U.S. Senate candidate Brad Wilson and Attorney General Derek Brown. The Lyman campaign has argued there are questions of urrounding the company that gathered those signatures.
Late Friday, 3rd District Court Judge Stephen Nelson declined to grant Lyman's request for an injunction ahead of Monday's statewide canvass, where the primary results will be finalized.
"Plaintiffs still have not presented any evidence to the Court about their timeline for the investigation process into the signature packets (if the Court were to grant the Motion) as well as how they would prevail in whatever legal process would be required to replace Spencer Cox and Diedre Hendeson [sic] on the final election ballot," he wrote. "Thus, Plaintiffs have failed to meet the very high bar required to award injunctive relief."
Nelson said Lyman's campaign can continue to sue for access, but also pointed out in the ruling that "Plaintiffs’ generalized allegations of harm to 'transparency' or 'integrity' in the primary election process are insufficiently vague."
Read the judge's ruling here:
