Utah House speaker seeks to return amendment ballot language role to legislative attorneys

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — Utah’s top legislative leaders are backtracking on a law passed last year that made Utah’s Senate president and House speaker responsible for writing the ballot summaries of proposed constitutional amendments.

Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz (R – Hooper) himself proposed a bill in committee that would return the responsibility of writing the ballot language to non-partisan legislative attorneys.

While presenting the bill, Schultz said the “change that was made last year was probably not the right way” and that this bill would revert it to the way it was.

“[This bill] takes it back to exactly the way it was before and has the nonpartisan legislative research attorneys write the language that is placed on the ballot for ballot initiatives,” Schultz said.

H.B. 563 “Ballot Title Amendments” gives that power to the legislative general counsel, however, the bill states that “the legislative general counsel performs the duties…as counsel for the presiding officers.”

It’s unclear exactly how much involvement Schultz and Senate President Stuart Adams (R -Kaysville) are allowed to have in future drafting.

The bill unanimously passed the House Government Operations Committee with no opposition from either party or the public. The bill will now go before the Utah House for debate amongst representatives.

This bill comes months after the Utah Supreme Court voided both Amendment A and Amendment D and criticized the legislature for what it called misleading language on the ballot.

In the court’s official ruling on Amendment D, Justice Diana Hagan said the summary written by Schultz and Adams did not disclose the “fundamental change” the amendment was seeking. It ruled that because of the misleading language, among other issues, the amendment was not able to be presented to voters.

Schultz did not go into detail on whether or not the Utah Supreme Court’s decision influenced his decision to propose a return to legislative attorneys’ writing ballot language. However, he did mention that when they first sought to change who wrote the ballot title it “was well before Amendment D … was even known about.”

Lindsay Aerts and Derick Fox contributed to this report.