Voters attempt to navigate long lines to participate in Republican caucuses and a presidential preference poll at Brighton High School in Cottonwood Heights, Utah, on Tuesday, March 5, 2024. (Kyle Dunphey/Utah News Dispatch)
To understand Utah’s SB54 — a crucial and, depending on who you talk to, an infamous piece of legislation that created the state’s unique dual path to the primary ballot — one must rewind more than a decade, even years earlier than 2014, when the bill first passed.
In 2010, Republican Sen. Bob Bennett unexpectedly lost his longtime seat in the U.S. Senate after Utah GOP delegates ousted him during their state nominating convention. That stoked concerns that Republican party delegates were becoming disconnected from the broader wishes of Utah’s typical Republican voter.
At the time, Utah’s voter participation also ranked dismally low — among the lowest in the country. That was before Utah adopted universal voting by mail years later, but it was also because the state’s elections were simply not competitive. The most crucial decisions for the Republican-controlled state were made by delegates at nominating conventions, not at the ballot box.
These concerns fueled a movement led by the group Count My Vote, which in 2013 approached the Utah Republican Party with a list of demands to increase voter participation — otherwise they’d pursue a ballot initiative to supplant the caucus-convention system with direct primaries. At the time, polling indicated Utahns would overwhelmingly support it.
Stan Lockhart, a former Utah Republican Party chairman, recalled this Wednesday during a forum hosted by the Sutherland Institute, a conservative think tank, sitting next to SB54’s architect, former Sen. Curt Bramble, R-Provo, and Taylor Morgan, executive director of Count My Vote.
“It was so offensive to those of us who are highly involved in the public convention process, because we had spent decades, in some cases, working to get good candidates elected, and we just didn’t feel like we were trying to manipulate the outcomes,” Lockhart recalled. “We felt like we were just participating in the process.”
Count My Vote brought “10 demands,” Lockhart said, but after negotiating the party, that list was whittled down to one to avoid a citizen initiative: increase the party’s nominating convention threshold of 60% of delegate support in order for a candidate to avoid a primary to 65%.
“The (party’s) central committee said, ‘Absolutely not,’” Lockhart recalled, adding that state delegates agreed. Their attitude was: “We’re not going to do anything that that group wants us to do. We are the decision makers of the party, and we will not cave to that demand.”
So, in late 2013, Count My Vote organizers filed to move ahead with a citizen initiative to replace the caucus-convention system.
A few months later, when the 2014 Utah Legislature’s general session was underway, Bramble — a longtime senator with a reputation as a tough negotiator who retired this year — stepped in.
Morgan said he’ll “never forget it.”
He recalled Count My Vote’s ballot initiative was “well on track” to qualify for the 2014 ballot with 150,000 signatures gathered, and he said he had just dropped off a huge box of signature packets when his phone rang. It was Rich McKeown with former Gov. Mike Leavitt, two leaders of the Count My Vote movement.
“The first thing they said is, ‘We need to meet. We’ve been Brambled,’” Morgan recalled, prompting laughs from the panel’s audience at the Thomas S. Monson Center in Salt Lake City.
Bramble, he said, “pulled off a brilliant legislative move. We came to the table, and we forged a compromise that, really, still stands today.”
That compromise was SB54.
Bramble’s regret
The law, passed during that 2014 session, solidified Utah’s dual nominating path to the primary. Candidates can either get their names on the ballot by winning 60% from party delegates — or by gathering signatures. Today, Utah’s signature thresholds are high compared to other states, requiring 28,000 for statewide races.
Passionate party delegates have hated it ever since, but SB54 has survived years of court challenges — to the point of almost bankrupting the Utah GOP.
But angst over SB54 persists, and it was one factor that further divided Utah Republicans during last year’s bitter gubernatorial race.
Gov. Spencer Cox’s failed challenger, Rep. Phil Lyman, won at convention with nearly 68% of delegate support but lost in the primary with 45.6% of the vote. Lyman largely catered to Republicans who favor the caucus-convention system and repeatedly claimed Cox was an illegitimate candidate, even though Cox got his name on the primary ballot by gathering signatures under the dual path allowed under SB54.
Still, Lyman continued his bid as a longshot unaffiliated write-in candidate in the Nov. 5 general election, and though Cox won with nearly 53% of the vote, more than 200,000 Utahns (13.6%) voted for Lyman — a remarkable number for a write-in bid, which usually garners only a fraction of a percent of the vote.
Lyman wouldn’t accept the results of the election. He filed two unsuccessful lawsuits, one with the Utah Supreme Court and one with the U.S. Supreme Court asking the courts to disqualify Cox from the election. Both were rejected.
The Lyman-Cox contest illustrates there are still deep divides within the Utah GOP, and many of those divides trace back to disagreement over the caucus-convention system and SB54.
That’s part of why Bramble said he regrets stepping in.
“Look, if I could go back and undo history, I never would have (ran) SB54,” Bramble said Wednesday.
In an interview after Wednesday’s panel, Bramble told Utah News Dispatch that in 2014 he believed “preserving the caucus system was a worthy objective because I’d been a product of that” for years.
“But now in hindsight, seeing the party’s response to that — instead of embracing it, recognizing that (qualified signature gathering candidates) had 28,000 Republicans ready to support this statewide candidate, the party has said, ‘If you get signatures, you’re not a Republican.’”
Bramble said now the issue has become a flashpoint issue for the party, with multiple county parties drawing up bylaw proposals to oppose and restrict signature gathering candidates from using party resources.
“I didn’t foresee SB54 being a wedge that would divide the Republican Party,” Bramble said.
Instead, the former senator said he now wishes he and other lawmakers would have let the Count My Vote ballot initiative play out — and let Utah voters decide.
“The strength of our system is the voice of the people. Polling is not the voice of the people. … The ultimate poll is the ballot,” Bramble said. “I would have let the outcome of that ballot question be the law of the land.”
Bramble added that he thought SB54 would “strengthen the voice of the people” by giving candidates more options to access the ballot. But “I did not foresee 10 years of litigation” and the party “bankrupting” itself over the issue, even though SB54 has survived every single court challenge.
During Wednesday’s panel, Bramble criticized longtime Republican Party members who have prioritized their love of the caucus convention system — and sought to “limit participation” by “controlling who can get on the ballot and “controlling who can cast a vote” — over welcoming ways to increase participation within the party.
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He said over the last 20 years, some Republican party leaders have wanted to “force, compel and coerce a particular path rather than letting the broader voice of the people prevail.”
“And there’s something inherently wrong with that,” Bramble said.
Though Bramble may wish he could change history, he can’t. And now a new Utah Legislature — one without Bramble in the Senate — is about to convene, for the 2025 session scheduled to begin on Tuesday.
In wake of the contentious Cox-Lyman matchup and amid continued frustrations with signature gathering, some lawmakers may try to change SB54, though it remains to be seen what they will do.
Election reform is one of the big topics the Utah Legislature is expected to take up during the 2025 session, including legislation to tweak or restrict voting by mail, and perhaps an effort to change who oversees the state’s elections.
If lawmakers do make changes to SB54, what should they do?
When posed this question during Wednesday’s panel, Lockhart, Bramble and Morgan all agreed if lawmakers consider any changes to SB54, they should lower the signature thresholds.
That may be a tricky debate, especially among Republicans who don’t believe signature gathering should be an option at all. But the trio argued that Utah’s extraordinarily high signature gathering thresholds actually fuel concerns that signature gathering opens the door for pay-to-play politics.
“It was never our intention, with Count My Vote, to create a dependency on paid signature gathering. So that is a real problem in the system today,” Morgan said.
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He added that issue is “compounded” by another limitation in Utah law that only allows one signature per race. “That creates a bit of a race among candidates to be the first to get their signatures in. Because if your signatures are in first, then you have first dibs on any signatures from voters who may have signed more than one candidate’s petition in that race.”
The 28,000 signature threshold for statewide candidates was meant to “bring the party to the table” to show broad support within the party, Bramble said. “Instead, the signature path and the very high thresholds have created a cottage industry for paying for signatures,” he said.
Bramble added that “it has done more to divide the party,” and now Republicans are infighting about signature gathering rather than focusing on policy.
Noting that every major 2024 race saw state delegates pick candidates who went on to lose handily at the primary, Bramble said Utah’s current system is “unsustainable.”
Morgan said the party should “stop playing games with the signature path, to try to diminish it and hurt candidates who gather signatures, and if they would start focusing on improving their caucus-convention process, then perhaps they would have higher participation.”
“But it is dying,” Morgan added, “because the party is not improving their own process in a zero-sum battle against signatures.”
To help improve SB54, Morgan said “everyday, good candidates” should be able to afford to access the ballot through signature gathering. “You should be able to gather signatures working as a volunteer, as a candidate. So that’s something we would really like to improve.”
Lockhart agreed. “I’d make it far less difficult,” he said. “I think the signatures is a good way to do it, but it should be the type of thing … that a candidate and their supporters could go out in the morning, gather the signatures, turn them in the afternoon and be on the ballot.”
Rep. Ray Ward, R-Bountiful, has a bill to lower the required signature thresholds for candidates to qualify for the ballot. It’s not yet clear how much traction it will gain.
“Ray Ward’s going to make a valiant effort in getting his bill passed,” Bramble said.
But some lawmakers, such as a handful of House representatives who signed onto a Deseret News op-ed arguing Utah’s elections have become “needlessly complicated,” may want to go a different route and perhaps try to dismantle SB54. But that’s been tried before, and efforts have stalled.
Bramble told Utah News Dispatch he’d “be very skeptical of SB54 being repealed.” But if there are competing efforts to lower signature gathering thresholds or maybe even increase them, those bills will be hashed between the House and Senate.
“If you have opposing bills,” he said, “I think they battle to a draw.”
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