By Robert Gherke | The Salt Lake Tribune | Photo by Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune
Salt Lake County Clerk Lannie Chapman wouldn’t mind having a DeLorean, a la “Back To The Future,” these days — or really anything she could turn into a time machine.
She needs it, she says, because the clock is ticking as her staff slogs through the process of validating signatures on a mountain of petition packets turned in last week by Protect Utah Workers, a coalition of labor groups trying to repeal an anti-union law.
It is equal parts drama and drudgery as clerk’s offices across the state now have less than two weeks to chip away at validating more than 320,000 signatures to determine if the labor referendum will become the first since 2007 to appear on the ballot. (In 2020, groups gathered signatures to repeal a food tax increase, but lawmakers relented and repealed the law before it went to a vote.)
And even in a high-tech world, it is a decidedly low-tech process: Hundreds of staff across the state hunched over computer terminals, going page by page and signature by signature through piles of petition packets.
Davis County Clerk Brian McKenzie said he has 14 employees taking shifts plowing through what they estimate is nearly 20,000 signatures submitted in the county. Each name or address is manually entered into the state’s voter database to ensure the signatory is a registered voter.
Once the registration is verified, the signature on the petition is compared to several signatures on file in the state’s database, like those from driver licenses, voter registrations and other official records.
Read more at SLTrib.com.
This article is published through the Utah News Collaborative, a partnership of news organizations in Utah that aims to inform readers across the state.