Senator Curtis’s Nucksat

LASTING LEGACY: Russell M. Nelson, former president of the Church of Latter Day Saints, dies at 101.

The Origin of SB54: How Utah Lost Its Voice In order to truly understand how Utah got to its current predicament, you have to understand how our election nominating system works. Utah uses a caucus-convention system to select its nominees for office from the various parties. As longtime Weber County conservative Bill Olson once told me, the caucus-convention system is the perfect microcosm of representative government. Neighbors meet together, talk out the issues, and select a delegate who they delegate their decision-making privilege to. The job of a delegate is to do the hard work: the research, the vetting, the tough questions, and then select the best candidate possible on behalf of everyone in their precinct. This system worked for decades because Utahns understood something simple but profound: the average person doesn’t always have the time or the opportunity to do the deep dive on every candidate for every office. The caucus-convention system was a way to have someone you trust do that work, so we could elect good, principled people rather than whoever had the biggest ad budget. It’s brilliant. Which is why it’s been under attack for over a decade. In 2010, the establishment got the shock of its life when Senator Bob Bennett) a three-term incumbent and one of the most powerful figures in Washington) went to the convention and never even made it to the primary ballot. Grassroots delegates chose to go in a different direction, and Mike Lee eventually went on to win the seat. The political and business elite in this state looked at what happened to Bob Bennett and said, never again. That’s when Count My Vote was born. They sold it as a way to “expand participation” and “give voters more choice.” But look at who was behind it: Mitt Romney, Gail Miller, Norman Bangerter, the most well-connected and wealthy people in the state, and you start to see what it really was: an insurance policy for the powerful. Count My Vote’s goal was to neuter the caucus-convention system by creating a “signature path” so any well-funded candidate could pay for signatures and buy their way onto the ballot, bypassing the delegates entirely. They weren’t trying to make the process more democratic, they were trying to make sure they’d never lose to the grassroots again. And the legislature went right along with it. Senator Curt Bramble sponsored SB54, which took most of Count My Vote and wrote it into law. And ever since, we’ve been living with the results. So now you know the story behind SB54 and the Count My Vote bill. Unfortunately, what was sold to us as a way to include everyone in the political process has resulted in a government rife with corruption, liars, and secret combinations. If Utah wants to get out of this mess, SB54 simply needs to go and the caucus-convention system needs to be restored. The signature path has proven itself to be corrupt over the last decade, and especially in 2024. What SB54 accomplished was nothing less than enabling the state of Utah to pick its own officeholders, which is dangerously close to the definition of tyranny. I’ve had conversations with state senators who tell me there aren’t currently enough votes to repeal SB54, which means we have two options: either elect senators in 2026 who will repeal it, or abolish the signature path by ballot initiative. Either way, if we want our state back, we have work to do.

Free speech advocates on the right have a lot of heavy lifting to do.

The executive of a state sets the tone for that state.