Forward Party's open approval-voting vacancy election in Utah names Emily Buss amid low turnout and technical hiccups

An open vacancy election organized by the Forward Party of Utah and run with approval voting and Secure Internet Voting (SIV) technology concluded with Emily Buss declared the winner, organizers said.

The election invited roughly 70,000 district residents to choose among party-qualified applicants; it used approval voting (voters could "approve" multiple candidates and the candidate with the most approvals wins) and combined party outreach, approval-voting advocacy groups and SIV's digital platform. David Ernst, who described his organization's role in the vote, said the result was recognized by the state senate president and the Republican party leadership and that the preliminary winner, Emily Buss, "was the winner" of the contest.

Organizers said about 1,324 ballots were cast, which Ernst characterized as roughly a 12% turnout of the 70,000-person district. That figure circulated after a meeting participant noted a figure described earlier as "less than 2%"; Ernst corrected and explained turnout was lower than Forward Party volunteers had hoped (they had expected thousands) and cited factors including low name recognition, confusion over whether the vote was open to all voters and limited resources for outreach.

The operation combined three partners: the Utah Forward Party (which ran the open nomination and candidate screening), the Center for Election Science (an advocacy group for approval voting), and SIV (Secure Internet Voting), which provided the digital voting platform. Ernst said the project's total cost was expected to be in the neighborhood of $30,000, funded largely by private donors who support approval voting and by some party and allied-group resources.

Organizers also reported a printing/mailed-letter glitch that reduced the number of mailed unique voter codes. Ernst said the plan had combined codes into letters to save costs (e.g., up to three voters per envelope with unique codes inside), but a print-shop deduplication step reduced the number of letters actually mailed: "about one-eighth of the letters did not end up getting sent," he said, estimating 33,000 intended letters versus about 30,000 actually mailed. Ernst said the team had backup methods (in-person options, provisional flows and alternate code recovery) to mitigate the problem.

Security and auditing measures were described as part of the post-election process. Ernst said the system was "source-available" (the code is published but not freely licensed) and that SIV had subjected the platform to outside scrutiny including DEFCON exercises. He described cryptographic bulletin-board evidence, IP-address analyses, and a post-results "challenge period" in which investigators and observers can request audits; he said auditors could sample the voter roll and perform randomized checks to confirm voters actually cast the ballots submitted. Ernst said the organizers planned to publish audit and cryptographic data in the coming days.

On challenges and public reaction, Ernst said there had been "one minor challenge" and some public concern that party leaders could try to reverse the open outcome. He said the state legislature and the senate president had acknowledged the result and that proposed legal fights had not materialized as of the meeting.

Ernst and meeting participants framed the experiment as informative for alternative-voting practice: it demonstrated an operational path for an open vacancy election that combined private funding, digital infrastructure and approval voting, but it also showed practical limits in outreach, costs and the sensitivity of mail-based code distribution. The organizers said they will publish a fuller post-election report with cost accounting and audit artifacts.