SALT LAKE CITY — Utah voters appear poised to pass a proposed constitutional amendment that would eliminate the requirement for future constitutional amendments to be published in newspapers in each county for two months before the election.
Votes for Amendment A currently edge votes against Amendment A, 60% to 40%, according to preliminary Utah election results updated just before 9:30 p.m. The results are based on more than 580,000 votes counted so far.
Instead of requiring proposed constitutional amendments to be published in newspapers, Amendment A requires future amendments to be publicized “in a manner provided by statute.”
The amendment would also change the required length from “two months” to “60 days” immediately preceding an election to clear up any potential confusion about when exactly the notices must be available.
The issue came into focus for lawmakers in 2024 after a Utah district court judge invalidated that year’s Amendment D, citing in part a failure to properly publicize the amendment prior to the election. The amendment would have given lawmakers the power to overturn ballot initiatives passed by voters.
A resolution proposing the new amendment aimed to fix that and passed the Legislature unanimously in 2025.
“That came to light during some recent court decisions that kind of highlighted that it’s supposed to be in physical, print newspapers,” Rep. Anthony Loubet, R-Kearns, told lawmakers while presenting the resolution to a House committee in early 2025. “Nowadays, that’s not where people get their information.”
The resolution was approved alongside a bill that would codify new rules for publishing proposed amendments. HB481 would require the Legislature to publish the text of amendments on the state’s Public Notice Website and on the Legislature’s website. The bill will take effect Jan. 1, 2027, if voters approve Amendment A.
It’s unclear how many more votes are left to count. All election results aren’t final until the state’s board of canvassers votes to certify election results when they meet on Nov. 23.
Click here for more U.S. and Utah election results.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
Leave a Reply