Should county clerks be nonpartisan? | Kevin Johnson & Brian McKenzie

I'm grateful to both of you because these days discussions about voting and election policy are common, they are at times contentious, and they are really important.

And one of the things we try and do is talk about potential reforms to election policy generally that can strengthen our voting and election system in the country and, of course, here in Utah.

So with that, Kevin, I want to start with you, because the Election Reformers Network has this new proposal, or this new document rather, I don't know if the idea is new per se, but essentially arguing for county clerk elections to be nonpartisan offices when they run for election or reelection.

And I want to start there and maybe ask you to give us an overview of the proposal.

What are you trying to do with this proposal? Essentially, what's the argument? Give us the quick version for our audience to get up to speed.

Yeah, that's terrific, Nick, and thank you for giving me a chance to speak about this.

I think there's sort of two core arguments to this.

One is that we've heard from a lot of clerks and other election officials that partisan elections really make the workplace and their working situation difficult.

And I can get into that in a little bit more detail, but it's basically a context of, you know, we have two parties that right now are so polarized and so divided And those parties can put a lot of pressure on folks.

And we've heard from a lot of clerks that they'd much rather have that greater distance.

And greater distance between the management of election and the parties that compete in elections is really a very common sense idea.

And it's actually the way elections are administered pretty much in every other democracy.

So there's a lot for this generally, and I think there's a lot for it now, given the the kind of tensions that we're in.

And the way our elections are structured, there really isn't any need for people to run elections in a Democratic way or run elections in a Republican way.

The law says how to run elections.

Mostly we have great elections with really good clerks who do their job.

They follow the law.

And so the party affiliation ends up being mostly a negative in terms of creating a working environment where you're sort of at risk of getting pressure from the party that you were elected under.

That's the summary of it, I'd say.

Yeah.