SALT LAKE CITY — The Utah Lieutenant Governor's Office is reporting significant issues in Utah County's primary election in June.
They say there were vote discrepancies found at polling places and a high rate of rejected signatures from mail-in ballots.
On July 2, a week after the June primary election took place, election staff members with the Lieutenant Governor's office visited the Utah County Clerk's Office. The staff reviewed Utah County records, including the number of individuals who checked in at each polling place and the number of ballots cast at each location in the county.
In a report from the Lieutenant Governor's office, they found that at least 19 more ballots were cast than voters who had checked in at various polling locations in Utah County.
"It was 16 in Lehi, one in Pleasant Grove, and then in our own office we had two," said Utah County Clerk Aaron Davidson.
Lissa Brock lives in Provo and voted in the primary election in June.
She says it came as a little bit of a surprise to hear there were some vote discrepancies found in that election.
"But then also, it doesn't seem like the most efficient system," said Brock.
The report pointed to Utah County's use of a "fast cast" voting system.
Davidson says it allowed people to fill out their ballot at home and bring it to the in-person polling locations, while showing their ID and signing the poll pad.
"They kind of had this two-step process and somehow some of the voters skipped the second process and put their ballots into the voting machine without being fully checked in," said Davidson. "So they were legitimate ballots from the perspective of the voter."
The Lieutenant Governor's Office report says a key security feature has to be disabled for "fast cast" tabulators to read by-mail ballots. It goes on to say that disabling would allow for any ballot to be read and could create the potential for multiple ballots to be scanned in by one voter.
The report recommended that the "fast cast" method be abandoned or significantly modified to bring it into compliance with state code.
"We have gone through and really revised the process to make it much more simpler, and ... be able to track how many ballots or how many people showed up, how many ballots were cast, and then how many ballots are actually counted and received here at the ballot processing center," said Davidson.
The Lieutenant Governor's Office also found that Utah County's signature rejection rate was higher than the statewide average and more than five times higher than it was in 2023.
"Our rejection rate has been increasing at a steady gradual rate. There's no erratic fluctuations in it," said Davidson. "We may have swung a little bit and that's why we have started doing additional training every Monday with our staff going over past signatures, because the training we receive from the Lieutenant Governor's office is very context, is very textual."
Davidson told FOX 13 News on Tuesday that training goes anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour, where they go over actual signatures that were either approved or rejected in the last election.
He says they accepted the recommendations from the Lieutenant Governor's Office and are working to implement all of them.
"We're doing everything we can to make it safe and secure," said Davidson.
