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Auditors, county clerks and elections officials brief committee on petition signature verification, audits and fraud investigation
Summary
Legislative auditors, the state auditor, the lieutenant governor and county clerks reviewed how signature gathering and verification work in Utah, described audit findings and a statewide manual re‑verification that examined roughly 302,000 petition signatures and identified patterns of circulator‑linked fraud and data‑entry problems.
A multi‑agency briefing on June 18 reviewed how Utah verifies signatures for initiatives, referendums and candidate nominating petitions and described recent audits and a criminal‑fraud investigation that examined hundreds of thousands of signatures.
What happened: The Office of Legislative Auditor General (OLAG) sampled signatures from three major candidate petitions and reported non‑zero error rates in verification; OLAG audited 1,000 signatures per candidate to measure false accepts and false rejects. Separately, the Office of the State Auditor (OSA) and county clerks performed a near‑complete manual re‑verification to support a criminal investigation; OSA reviewed about 301,893 of 304,380 submitted signatures (about 99.18%).
Why it matters: Signature gathering and verification procedures determine whether petitions and candidate nominations meet legal thresholds for ballot access or legislative referral. The committee heard that process design, circulator behavior and data quality all affect verification results and public confidence.
Key legal and…
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