Lt. Gov. Henderson sends DOJ public voter info after letter questions maintenance of voter registration rolls

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — After the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) requested voter information from Utah’s Lieutenant Governor, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson has, in part, granted their request, handing over Utah’s publicly available voter list along with data on how many voters have been removed from the rolls over the last two years.

The letter, sent from the DOJ on July 15, also specifically asked for the number of non-citizen voters, incompetent voters, and felons who had been removed from November 2022 to 2024.

In her newly released response, the LG notes that four non-citizen voters were removed from voter registration records between November 2022 to November 2024. Zero voters were removed from voter rolls due to incompetence, and 4,225 voters were removed because of felony convictions.

Henderson’s letter said all the information provided was publicly available, meaning voters whose registration is set to private or withheld would not have had their data shared. Publicly available data includes name, addresses, birth year, and a history of elections in which the voter voted.

The DOJ said that it wanted to make sure that Utah was complying with national election law, known as the NVRA or National Voter Registration Act, and was worried about Utah’s low rate of disqualifying voters based on incomplete survey responses from Utah’s county clerks. They are required to participate in a survey every election, known as the Election Assistance Commission’s Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS).

The letter also asked for the data from those incomplete responses, like duplicate voters removed from the rolls.

“The statewide total of removed voters between December 1, 2022 and November 30, 2024 is 109,346. When the actual number of removed voters is used, the percentage of removals changes from 0.08% to 5.4%,” the letter states.

In her response, Henderson called Utah’s process for checking the rolls “robust” and wrote that the state of Utah has complied with federal election law, including NVRA.

“Utah has safe, secure, and timely safeguards and processes for maintaining voter registration lists,” she wrote, which are outlined in Utah Election Code.

As to why information was missing from the latest EAVS report, Henderson stated that it is because of the limitations of the state’s 25-year-old legacy system. That system cannot provide aggregated reports of this kind of information for every county, and instead, it is stored within each voter record.

As such, the Lt. Governor’s office reportedly spent the last two weeks manually compiling the requested data. Henderson also said that Utah is in the process of upgrading its election system to a “modern system with enhanced reporting capabilities,” which will be in place by the beginning of 2027.

The letter includes tables of data from November 2022 to November 2024 of voter registration removals by county and by reason for removal, merged voter records by county, and returned confirmation cards by county. You can view those tables here.

The most prominent reasons that voter registrations were removed were because of annual processing (52,761 records removed statewide), because the person died (32,803 records removed statewide), and because the person moved out of the county they were registered in (20,998 records removed statewide).

A total of 4,683 duplicate records were found statewide, and those records were merged in order to correct the error. Salt Lake County had the most duplicate records, with 1,304 records merged.

Across the state, 269,799 voters were sent confirmation cards, and 108,699 were marked by clerks as returned, which means that 45.4% of confirmation cards were returned. The DOJ reported that there was a discrepancy in the numbers, and Henderson explained that the discrepancy was because the data was incomplete.