SALT LAKE CITY — A review of Utah's voter rolls by the Lt. Governor's Office has so far found that no non-citizen has actually cast a ballot.
What it found is 99.9% of registered voters in Utah are U.S. citizens. The results of the review, shared with FOX 13 News, did uncover 486 out of the state's 2.1 million registered voters do not have complete information on file.
"We have eventually found 486 active votes who we need more information on that we can’t confirm citizenship. We’ve confirmed the citizenship of the others and found one confirmed non-citizen that never did vote that was on the voter rolls," Lt. Governor Deidre Henderson said in an interview with FOX 13 News.
That confirmed non-citizen never voted, Henderson said, and have since been removed from the voter rolls. Others are being contacted to provide additional data. About a third of them, she said, have been voting for decades and pre-date laws requiring more proof of ID to vote.
It is illegal for non-citizens to vote in elections already, but the Utah State Legislature is considering a bill to require more proof of citizenship to vote. Currently, a driver's license or the last four digits of a Social Security number are checked before someone is registered to vote. House Bill 209 passed a House committee earlier this week and is due to be voted on soon in the full House of Representatives.
House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, told reporters earlier this week he had heard there may be "hundreds" of non-citizens voting and defended the bill as necessary to ensure trust in elections. Lt. Gov. Henderson's Office said it has been speaking with the bill's sponsor, Rep. Cory Maloy, R-Lehi, about it and expressed some support for the legislation. Critics say it could be used to target minority voters.
Lt. Gov. Henderson, who is the state's chief elections officer, ordered the review of voter rolls last year. She said what it has found is that county clerks largely do a good job of maintaining those rolls and ensuring people are legally eligible to vote.
But Lt. Gov. Henderson warned about some issues with just kicking people off the voter rolls without evidence.
"It happened to me. In 2022, while I was Lt. Governor and chief elections officer of the state of Utah. I didn’t get my ballot in the '22 primary. I had my staff look into it and found that my county clerk at the time had gone through the voter rolls and just taken everybody who was born outside the country off," she said.
Lt. Gov. Henderson was born in the Netherlands, where her father was serving at the time in the U.S. Air Force.
"I was marked as a non-citizen, and if it could happen to me? It could happen to anybody," she said.
