SALT LAKE CITY — Utah is already working to combat misinformation ahead of the 2024 elections by urging county clerks to have "open door" policies.
One of the state's most prominent leaders, Lt. Governor Deidre Henderson, is leading the charge to build trust ahead of elections.
"I think it’s fair to expect that we will continue to see some misinformation and disinformation in 2024," she explained. "We’d be pretty naive to expect all of that has gone away. It’s not gone anywhere."
Henderson has urged county clerks across the state to throw open their doors and let the community see how votes are counted.
"Trust is built on a couple of things: It’s built on competence and it’s built on ethics," she reflected. "So we have to be good at what we do and we have to be good people in order to build trust in the electorate. That’s what we’ve been working really hard on in our state."
The initiative has made Henderson more of a national figure as she speaks across the country about ways to ensure confidence in elections, working with her counterparts in other states.
"It’s easy to hear something on a national news outlet or see something on social media or hear something at the dinner table that makes you worry about what we might do in Utah," she explained. "But then to go see firsthand, it makes a big difference."
Despite national attacks on the vote-by-mail process, Utah is a state that overwhelmingly relies on it. In the last special election for Congress, 98% of Utahns used a mail-in ballot.
Lt. Governor Henderson says in the upcoming election cycle, her team will do even more outreach to dispel any myths and misinformation but she offered one suggestion to help people learn to weed out facts from lies on their own.
"The biggest problem we have is people who are sowing outrage in order to score political points," she said. "So if you hear something that doesn’t sound reasonable, that sounds outrageous and makes you angry, really that can be the red flag to think maybe this isn’t true. Maybe I need to check this out."
This story was produced for National News Literacy Week, when FOX 13 News and others team up to ensure the public has the skills to be informed and participate in democracy.
