Questions & Answers

During the 2012 election, I read an opinion piece that basically said, “The only perfect candidate is you. No candidate will agree with you completely so if you can’t find a candidate that you can live with, get into the race.” With all that has been happening in the last 2+ years and how government officials have been fighting back against the public, I decided it was my year to run for office so the people have someone in office supporting the issues that concern them. I want to be that public servant the people are looking for rather than the public official that is trying to protect the government position.

Read my story on the Alpine School District’s behavior and the Commissioner’s Meeting on Votor integrity that really made me run for office.

I believe the county clerk, especially at this point of time with so many voters questioning election integrity, has to have a very strong understanding of data and how to dissect it to find where things are going wrong, which have led to creating an environment where the voters have lost trust in the election process.

I have earned two master's degrees, a Master’s in Accountancy with an emphasis in Information Systems and a Master of Business Administration with an emphasis in Finance. I worked on these two master’s degrees simultaneously at BYU, taking as many as 24 graduate level course hours in one semester. So, I know what dedicated work looks like. After graduating, I went on to work for PriceWaterhouse in their management consulting division working on system implementations, conversions, and customizations for large companies.

I left PriceWaterhouse to start my own database systems consulting company and worked mainly in the Oil Production and Long-term Care industries. I have also started and sold two other businesses.

I would say my main qualification for the county clerk position is my understanding of how data is storied and how to extract and create meaningful information and reports out of the raw data. This is one of the most critical understandings that is needed to protect the voter rolls and to gain back election integrity.

First off, I was at the County Commissioners Meetings where the public demanded an audit of the elections and I supported an audit and even stood up during the community comment section and expressed my views. If elected I will do everything the office can legally do to audit the election. If I were prevented from an audit by state officials, I will start auditing the voter rolls and start cleaning the rolls up as much as possible. I believe from my education and business experience in data, I can do a lot to clean up the rolls so at least the next election will be significantly cleaner with more election integrity.

I believe one of the reasons people do not get out to vote is because they do not believe their vote counts. One of the things I would like to do is make the vote results more public in more detail so people can see how their vote counts. To do this, I would post the vote results by precinct on the county website so everyone can see how their vote affected the outcome in their precinct and how the individual precinct votes add up to the total county votes. And if the precinct chair would like to canvass their precinct, I would provide that information to them. I believe this would instill more faith in the voting process and inspire more people to register to vote.

I believe arguments can be presented for rank-choice voting as a legitimate voting process, but once any argument is presented, it can be dissected in a real situation and it fall short as being a legitimate way of having a trustworthy outcome from this voting process. It might possibly work with three candidate, but one it moves into 4 or more, the theory falls apart. The average voter will not put in the time to vet a large pool of candidates to place a meaningful ranking for each candidate or they may not even enter a ranking beyond the first 2 or 3 candidates. However, if the candidate they preferred is removed from the list of candidates in multiple rounds of votes, they would then give the remaining candidates a further vetting to identify an acceptable candidate that they would prefer. Rank choice voting takes the option away from the voter.

Here is a link to an example of how the theory behind ranked choice voting falls apart when implemented in a real election: https://rumble.com/vquinc-why-ranked-choice-voting-rcv-is-a-bad-idea-a-pros-and-cons-approach.html

I believe Utah County does a good job of handling the ballots once they are received. But, based on the number of delegates that have expressed their experiences to me of the number of ballots that were received at their homes, I don't believe Utah County does a very good job of keeping a very clean voter roll record. When I am elected, I will start with a deep audit of the voter rolls and clean it up of all old and illegal records. I have the background in data necessary to thoroughly vet the voter rolls internally and not rely upon a third party vendor to do so.

Currently, the State of Utah has a contract with ERIC (Electronic Registration Information System) to review the voter rolls to clean up the records. Here is a link to an article published on the Gateway Pundit explaining the origins of ERIC and the article has links at the bottom to three more articles on ERIC.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/01/cleaning-voter-rolls-soros-founded-funded-eric-now-used-31-states/

This article is why I believe it is very important for the new county clerk to be very competent in data technology. I have the training and experience to audit the data and clean the voter rolls.

Ideally, I would go back to in person voting with precinct level voting locations with the requirement to show ID. With that being said, the state is currently requiring all counties to have universal mail-in balloting. So each county has to mail out ballots to everyone on the voter rolls, so the most important aspect is to have the cleanest possible voter rolls. (See the answer to question 7 above.) 

What the state doesn't require is what is said on the instructions. I would still open up precinct polling stations and on the ballot instructions, state that the ballots are to be returned to the polling station on election day for drop off. I would still have early drop off locations, but only in locations that can have 24 hour surveillance cameras in place. And lastly allow for ballots to be dropped of at the post office if mailing from outside of the county.

I would also perform a process audit of the ballots to verify the ballot handling process all the way to verifying the vote count before sending the vote count to the state and verify it was received properly. I would not oppose a forensic audit of the vote, especially if there were a way through donations to pay for the audit without using public funds. I am not opposed to using public funds, but that has been one of the arguments of not performing an audit. I will work for an audit by whatever means are necessary to do so.

This was the complete asked questions: 

One of the candidates stated: The state legislature sets the laws for voting and the county clerk has to work within the bounds of that law. While I have worked tirelessly to help our legislators pass laws that bring transparency and security to our elections, I was still bound by state and federal laws regarding elections. Any clerk candidate who tells you they will change the law doesn’t understand the process or how elections actually work. How do you respond?

Read my response to question 8 first and then in addition to the points made there, I would do the following:

Upon being elected, I would go around and poll the other 28 county clerks in Utah and form an association or coalition with those that feel the election process needs to be changed back to in-person voting. I would ask each county clerk to ask their county commissioners to hold a public meeting to see if their constituents would back a county referendum to going back to in-person voting and then together as a county coalition, find agreeable legislators to sponsor a bill to petition the state legislature to change the code to reflect what the public wants in regard to the voting process.

As per Utah state code, any meeting that falls within the Open and Public Meetings Act held by any county office must give at least 24 hours notice on the county website. I believe what would be really nice if notice could be given with an agenda as soon as it is known, even if that is way before the 24 hour notice. It would also me nice to establish a contact list of those people who would like to receive an email notice directly to them of any happenings in the county. That would be a fairly easy process to set up. Thanks for the question and I'll look into setting up that notification process.

Currently, documents (i.e. agendas, meeting minutes) posted on the County’s website for the public to view are image files and not searchable PDF files. If someone wants to find a specific topic or word in the document, they have to read through the document to find the topic or word. These documents should be saved as searchable PDF files which would allow the public to search the document to find the information they are looking for with much more ease. I am committed to posting all documents moving forward as searchable PDF files and start the process of converting and posting past documents as searchable PDF files if the source documents are still available. In addition, there is no search bar on the County Commissioners' page. I would have this added so the public can easily search for the documents they need.

Here is an example of what I am talking about: https://www.utahcounty.gov/dept/commish/data/minutes/CM/2022/03.02.2022.pdf

This document is the minutes from the March 2, 2022 County Commissioner's meeting. If you try to click on a word in the document, you cannot highlight any word because it is an image of the document rather than document itself. I would post the document on the website rather than the image so it would be searchable. 

I cannot think of any real or perceived conflict of interest in holding the position of County Clerk in any of my personal or business dealings.