SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — A new bill proposed in Utah’s state legislature is seeking to raise how many active voters can be inside of a voting precinct.
H.B. 27, sponsored by Representative James Dunnigan (R-HD36), is seeking to increase the current 1,250 cap, to 3,000, in an effort to adapt to Utah’s growing population. In an interview with ABC4.com, Dunnigan says the change is important as the populations grows.
“Utah is growing, our population is growing, so we are going to allow a precinct to have up to 3,000 voters,” Dunnigan explained while speaking of his bill. “It doesn’t mean they will have 3,000, but they can have that many.”
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Precincts, or voting precincts, are small districts that are used by county clerks and election officials to organize neighborhoods and voters together who are voting for the same offices from president down to local offices. They are also used by political parties to organize local voters to elect party officers and delegates to party conventions.
Importance in county organization
According to state law, when precincts reach 1,250 voters, county clerks are required to split those precincts. Regardless of whether those two new precincts are voting in the same elections. The last time that cap was increased was in 2006.
“Frankly, in the southwest part of Salt Lake County, we keep growing. It’s amazing. It’s incredible,” Lannie Chapman, Salt Lake County clerk (D-Salt Lake County), told ABC4.com. “But because of that, we now have close to 150 precincts in Salt Lake County alone that are either at or close to that max capacity of that 1250 number … My team is currently looking at those precincts to figure out the easiest way to divide some of those current precincts to not fall ill of the law.”
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For perspective, Salt Lake County currently has 984 individual precincts. Chapman and Dunnigan, who have worked bi-partisanly on H.B. 27, mentioned how with current development in the valley, a new apartment complex is sometimes enough to reach the current cap for precincts.
Chapman also says that with the precincts constantly splitting, it forces the county to print ballots, that have the same races on them, for different precincts. Raising the cap, according to Chapman, would help save the county money in printing costs each election season.
“When I [split a district] because of state law, it causes that much more proofing to go into effect … and it’s one more ballot to create and one more ballot to proof and mail out,” Chapman began. “By allowing us to grow a bit … it allows us to maybe pause a bit on adding more precincts so that I don’t have to create an additional ballot and therefore proof another ballot, saving the taxpayers just a little bit of money.”
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Importance to party function
Precincts are also essential to political party functions. In Utah’s caucus system, parties hold local meetings corresponding with voters’ precincts to elect precinct officers and delegates to county and state conventions.
According to Chris Null, chair of the Salt Lake County Republican Party, the splitting of precincts caused issues with turnout and allocation of delegates to convention. He explained in an interview to ABC4.com, that though precincts would be added, delegate within the party remained the same, causing precincts to have fewer and fewer delegates to elect to convention.
“What it meant is we had to keep on spreading those delegates out across those precincts, regardless of the number of Republicans,” Null explained. It was this issue, according to Null, that led the party to combine precincts which led to confusion on caucus night in 2024.
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“It was a great idea at the time. We needed it, and in 2024 caucus we used it, but it caused a lot of chaos,” Null recounted. “Once we combined two or three or four precincts, that didn’t match their voter registration … We thought we had solved the problem, but we created a new one.”
Null, along with Chapman and Dunnigan, began working bi-partisanly on increasing the cap for precincts. According to Dunnigan, raising the cap will help local precincts fill positions which often go unfilled.
“[Precincts] struggle to get officers,” Dunnigan began. “They may have 1250 voters on record, but you go there and say, ‘who wants to be the chairman, vice chair, treasure, the delegates,’ and some of them really struggle to even fill those assignments.”
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The group hopes that this change will help improve the process moving forward.
Bipartisanship in introduction
Though the bill has been written and introduced, it still has to go through the legislative process. It will need to pass committee votes and go through each chamber of the state’s legislature before being sent to the Governor for signing.
During ABC4.com’s interview with Dunnigan, he described he initally came onto the issue with complaints from constituents who believed that Chapman had been intentionally splitting precincts. He recounts meeting with the Chapman and talking about the cap requirement, and the joint realization of the issue.
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“I was like, that’s a dumb law,” Dunnigan recalled in reference to his meeting with Chapman. “So, I started looking into it and said why we don’t we just give some more flexibility, and they said they would be very supportive of that.
“It’s been good to just put aside political beliefs or partisanship and just say what’s the best policy for the state, and what’s the best to serve our neighbors and our communities and can we work together, and it’s come together,” Dunnigan said.
The 2025 General Session is set to begin Jan. 21 and will continue to Mar. 7.