The Heritage Foundation currently ranks Utah as the 41st most secure state for voting: https://www.heritage.org/electionscorecard/pages/states/ut.html

Some people have taken this ranking as proof that Utah's elections are not secure. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The ranking is based only on state laws.  They simply looked a state code and contacted a state elections administrator for additional details (https://www.heritage.org/electionscorecard/pages/methodology.html). If there were any safeguards that were used by one county, but not by another the state as a whole would not get credit. As an executive branch office, the County Clerk is not in a position to create laws, they are to do their best to administer the laws as written.

The ranking doesn't look at county-level systems. In conducting their analysis, the Heritage Foundation never toured a ballot center. They didn't look into the specific processes counties in Utah use to manage their elections. The examined laws on the books, but never the extent to which those laws are implemented or if counties are using best practices beyond state law.

The ranking doesn't include actual outcomes. They didn't look for actual cases of fraud, prevented fraud, or other procedural issues. Although they maintain a comprehensive list of voter fraud cases (https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud) these do not factor into the rating. In fact, they only list one case of voter fraud in Utah: false registrations in Daggett county in 2008. There is no specific evidence or analysis to support a claim that wide-spread fraud in occurring in Utah.

Utah scored very well on "Accuracy of Voter Registration Lists." Of the possible 100 points, 30 were allocated to the category "Accuracy of Voter Registration Lists." The highest state score was 27, Utah scored 24 which is a tie for 6th place. Utah County has procedures that would have earned 3 more points (to tie for first), but because those procedures are not state-wide or codified in law they didn't receive credit. One of the biggest arguments against vote-by-mail is that it doesn't work because voter rolls are so poorly maintained. The state of Utah, and Utah County in particular, is dedicated to clean, accurate voter rolls and it is the first safeguard in our vote-by-mail system.

The score card is biased against vote-by-mail. The next largest category is titled "Absentee Ballot Management" worth 21 points. This is where Utah is scored poorly, but only because the score card is completely biased toward vote-by-mail. A point-by-point analysis shows that Utah loses points by sending an "absentee ballot" to every active, registered voter, but then also loses additional points in relation to absentee ballot lists and request forms which we do not have. Because vote-by-mail is the primary way of conducting an election in Utah, we aren't conducting two different modes of voting simultaneously. All voters and all ballots are part of the same system with the same safeguards.

Utah does well on other scorecards. The Brookings Institution gave Utah a grade of A for our ability to have citizens safely vote during the pandemic: https://www.brookings.edu/research/voting-by-mail-in-a-pandemic-a-state-by-state-scorecard/