SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — The Utah Supreme Court will meet for an emergency hearing on Friday, Aug. 9, to hear oral arguments regarding mail-in ballots in Utah’s 2nd congressional district primary race.
Congressional candidate Colby Jenkins challenged the results after losing the primary election to incumbent Congresswoman Celeste Maloy in June by just 214 votes. Jenkins requested a recount but still lost the race despite narrowing the margin to 176 votes.
Jenkins alleges that over 1,100 mail-in ballots went incorrectly uncounted due to being processed and postmarked in Las Vegas despite being mailed out of Utah by the mail-in deadline.
According to the lawsuit, the voters placed their ballot in the mail before the deadline, the day before Election Day. However, those ballots were collected and sent to an out-of-state processing center, resulting in them being postmarked in Las Vegas after the deadline.
Jenkins appealed to the Utah Supreme Court to order those ballots to be viewed as valid and counted in the race. With the narrow margin between the two Republican candidates, the more than 1,100 ballots have the potential of swinging the results in either direction.
ABC4 has reached out to both Jenkins and Maloy for comment and is currently awaiting a response.
Colby Jenkins had previously filed a lawsuit against the Washington County clerk, alleging the clerk failed to release voter information whose ballots had not yet been cured.
Jenkins said his intent was to get the contact information of the voters to help notify them that their ballots needed to be fixed. A Washington County judge dismissed the lawsuit saying the release of that information was at the county clerk’s discretion.
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