A Utah County Clerk Grapples With Election Denial

Ricky Hatch, clerk for Utah’s Weber County, had a chance to interview for a government job when he was still in college. “Who would want to work in government?” he asked his professor. “That’s got to be the most boring thing ever.”

“Boring” would be the last word to describe his 16 years as clerk. They include running an election during a pandemic, fending off runaway conspiracies, a leadership role in preventing foreign election interference and a growing list of worries about staff and voter safety.

Hatch trained as an accountant and began his career as a certified public accountant. Later, he opened a private school (and became CFO for a chain of them). “We talked a lot about civic engagement,” he says. But he wasn’t engaged in any way himself, and it bothered him that he set a bad example outside the classroom.

Hatch learned there was a planning commission vacancy in his city, Farr West. “I walked into the mayor’s office, and said, ‘What’s a planning commissioner, and can I serve?’” he says. The mayor gave him a seat. A Republican, Hatch got involved with his local caucus and, bit-by-bit, in county and state efforts. His ideas about the people in politics began to shift. They weren’t all aggressive, self-interested “ladder climbers,” it seemed to him. They were regular people, his neighbors — people who wanted to serve.

When someone suggested he run for county clerk/auditor, he jumped at the chance to be paid to do two things he loved: finance and elections. He ran and won in 2010 and has been re-elected three times since.

Today, the job involves things he couldn’t have imagined a decade ago.

Fading Federal Support

Hatch lived in Germany during the 2000 election and voted by mail. “I remember talking to my international friends, and saying, ‘yes, it is crazy with all the court cases and everything — but look, no guns were shot, no bullets were fired, no rioting, nothing’,” he says, referring to the Florida recount in the presidential election. “It was an orderly transition in a very chaotic time, and I was really proud of that.”

His first years as clerk were similarly free of controversy. Weber County had its first vote by mail election in 2013. The state Legislature had passed legislation authorizing universal mail voting that March, and implementation was smooth.

The atmosphere began to change in 2016, when Russian attempts to interfere in the national election prompted federal investigation and fostered conspiracies and counter-conspiracies. In 2017, the federal government declared election infrastructure to be part of the nation’s “critical infrastructure,” clearing the path for greater cybersecurity assistance and other protections from the Department of Homeland Security.

“We were panicked,” says Hatch, who at the time was director of the election officials division at the International Association of Government Officials. “We didn’t know what this meant — we thought this was a federal takeover of elections.”

That takeover never came to pass. Instead, Hatch grew to appreciate the interest and cooperation from Washington. He joined a working group at the U.S. Election Assistance Commission to sort out how the elections sector could work with other parts of government to secure elections infrastructure. Federal analysts housed in the new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) helped conduct vulnerability scans of election systems, recommended updates and provided training.

“The thing that gave me hope was that the federal government, particularly in the Department of Homeland Security, really stepped up and tried to understand elections administration from the administrators’ perspective, and then that helped them understand the risk better,” he says.

The new Trump administration dismantled much of this DHS infrastructure after years of public rebuke from the president for refuting his claims that the 2020 election had been stolen. The centers that had provided assistance to election offices were eliminated due to CISA funding cuts. Ten million dollars allocated to help states with election security were cut.

Trump had fired the CISA director, Christopher Krebs, just before he left office in 2020. After his re-election, he issued an order for Krebs to be investigated, calling him a “bad-faith actor who weaponized and abused his government authority.”

Hatch feels confident he still has support from the local DHS employees who remain on the job. “We’ve worked really closely with DHS to get the best practices and the equipment and processes in place,” Hatch says. “We’re OK until we have a major breach; I’m worried that if there is a multicounty or multistate kind of incident, I just don’t know how much interest there is from D.C.”

More Pushback, More Work

The 2020 election brought new concerns and challenges in regard to staff and voter safety in Utah, though not on the scale seen in some states.

All voters received a ballot by mail, and almost all voted that way. There was no controversy about the outcome; Utah has voted Republican every year since 1968. Even so, some residents were unhappy. “They would say, ‘you know what happened in Wisconsin and Philadelphia and Georgia and Maricopa County[, Ariz.,] — elections are rigged and we need to fix it’,” Hatch says. “They were going off what they heard. And secondly, they didn’t realize every state is unique in how we run our elections.”

The drumbeat of denial rhetoric hasn’t stopped since.

Hatch and his staff haven’t received death threats like election officials in other states. Most threats have been political, he says — promises to run someone against him if he didn’t get rid of vote by mail, for example. A brick was thrown through his car window on the day his state certified results, one of three times his car was vandalized.

“These could very well have been completely unrelated incidents by teenagers,” Hatch says. “It just was weird that they all happened around significant election-related dates.” The incidents made his wife nervous, but local law enforcement said it didn’t have enough evidence to pursue them.

Another time, a person called and left a voicemail repeating claims that mail voting is a sham. “He said, ‘I’m coming in Thursday, and if you aren’t ready for me I’m going to show you what I’ve got,’” Hatch says. Staff stayed home that day, and extra security was assigned to their building.

The controversy is still roiling over 2020’s results as President Donald Trump continues to make false claims that he won the election. A Utah representative, Jefferson S. Burton, proposed a bill last year making changes to the state’s universal vote-by-mail system. The bill became law in March 2025. Going forward, ballots received after Election Day in Utah won’t be counted. Beginning in 2029, voters won’t receive a mail ballot unless they request it. This change, along with new ID requirements, will mean more work to ensure that all eligible voters have a chance to cast ballots, Hatch says.

Concern about election fraud, never a problem in Weber County and virtually nonexistent in Utah, has prompted laws requiring administrative tasks that Hatch describes as “non-value-added.”

“Reconciliations are important, and I think they should be done publicly,” he says. “But many of the requirements that the state Legislature has placed on us go far above and beyond any cost-benefit analysis.”

Nervous and Confident

Hatch is spending more time than ever planning for possible bomb threats, active shooter scenarios and cybersecurity incidents, and conducting training exercises to make sure his office is ready to respond. He’s a member of the Committee for Safe and Secure Elections, a group formed to help election offices around the country build stronger relationships with law enforcement. He has a solid relationship with his sheriff, but in other parts of the country — Florida, Texas, Wisconsin and Ohio, for example — some law enforcement officers view election officials and their work with suspicion.

Election officials across the country are nervous, Hatch says. Legislators don’t always talk to them before they pass laws that affect their operations. A last-minute change to ballot receipt deadlines or ID requirements could come with a near-impossible deadline for implementation.

There are also concerns about how the federal government might attempt to interfere or how citizens might behave. Hatch pointed to the Jan. 6 Capitol riots and the unprecedented FBI raids seizing 2020 election equipment as part of the new and more uncertain landscape for election officials.

“We’re confident in our ability to run an accurate, secure election, but we’ve seen what’s happened,” he says. “Who would have ever thought we’d see federal agents commandeering ballots from an election five years ago?”

Election administrators are worried about everything they are seeing, he says, and planning for every possibility. Hatch has found himself on the verge of tears at the close of elections since 2020. “It’s just gratitude, I guess, that nothing bad happened.”

The tense environment is also taking a toll on his staff and colleagues around the country. There are more mental health and stress management webinars than ever.

“It’s heavy, but we love it and we know how important it is,” he says. “So we carry on, because it’s got to be done.”