Tom Williams: Tom Williams here. Along with National Public Radio's coverage of the national election results, I'm going to be here along with USU Political Science Professor Damon Cann and our whole UPR news apparatus here giving you some local results and analysis. Damon, thanks for coming back in.
Damon Cann: Great to be here. Tom,
Tom Williams: This has become a tradition, so thanks for thanks for staying up late with us, and you'll be in with me on Access Utah in the morning as well.
Damon Cann: Yep, love to be here.
Tom Williams: And we do have, I believe, on the line with us first guest of the evening: Lannie Chapman, who's a Salt Lake County Clerk. Thanks for joining us.
Lannie Chapman: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.
Tom Williams: So busy night for you, I expect, even with mail-in voting. Is it busy for you as a county clerk?
Lannie Chapman: You know, it's a quite a busy night. We're seeing a huge turnout. As of 5:00 this afternoon, we were already above 68% of active voters participating, and we're just seeing a lot of people still in line. We still have about an hour left of in person voting, and then, of course, our by-mail drop boxes. We're emptying those constantly, and we're seeing quite a huge turnout there as well.
Tom Williams: So is there priority for what gets voted — what gets counted first? Because the people in line are dropping off their — dropping off their ballots. Are they not?
Lannie Chapman: They are correct. So we've been processing ballots since we mailed them out 21 days ago. At this point, our election night results, our first results, will be the by-mail ballots that we've processed so far. Those will include ballots that we received up through yesterday.
Of course, we will not be able to process the ballot that we received today because we still have to do signature verification, ensuring that the voters are, in fact, eligible to vote that ballot before we can scan them and include them in our election night results. Later tonight, we will also update our election night results to include those people that voted in person.
Damon Cann: Tell us a little bit about what that signature verification process looks like. We hear a lot of questions from voters. What goes into verifying a voter signature?
Lannie Chapman: Quite a bit. In the state of Utah, we have access to driver's license signatures, we have access in the voter's record to the voter form that they originally filled out when they registered to vote, party affiliation, and prior affidavit envelopes when they sent in their by-mail ballot. So we have quite a few signatures to verify their affidavit signature again.
Tom Williams: You mentioned -- was it 50% turnout? We don't know what the figure’s going to be in the end. How do you think this year's turnout is going to compare to previous years?
Lannie Chapman: So, you know, I'm thinking we're going to see hundreds of thousands of ballots this year. I don't think we're going to quite hit 2020 numbers, but I think we're going to get very close.
Tom Williams: Yeah, amazing. So what's the next -- so my understanding is, if you're in line by 8:00, you can still drop your ballot off?
Lannie Chapman: You betcha. So if you're still in line at a drop box at 8:00, you still have the opportunity to put that ballot in our drop box. Similarly, if you're in line to vote in person at 8 p.m. you will still have that opportunity to vote in person, so long as you are in line by 8 p.m.
Tom Williams: So, still opportunity to vote, so people get out and vote.
Lannie Chapman: Absolutely.
Tom Williams: Yeah. Then what's next for you? Just use processing ballots, I guess. When will we when will we have information -- Return information – do you think?
Lannie Chapman: Of course, tonight we will start releasing results, as we're allowed to by state statute. Tomorrow, we will release more results, and we will continue to whittle that down when we're processing our by-mail ballots. And then, of course, Utah has same-day registration, so for those voters that voted in person and same-day registered, we will ensure that they were in fact eligible to vote before we count their in person, both those will be included as well. So I think we have a two week canvas and I hope to be done well before that
