By Katie McKellar | Senior Reporter
Utah’s top election official, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, was a panelist on an episode of the PBS series “Breaking the Deadlock” titled: “How to Fix an Election.” During the panel, she was asked to confront a hypothetical scenario in which a fictional president’s administration pressured her to hand over sensitive, private voter information.
But that scenario isn’t far off from what Henderson and other state election officials are facing in real life.
In today’s Dispatch, we report what Henderson said in the PBS episode that aired the same day she received a threatening letter from the U.S. Department of Justice, the reversal of state legislative leaders who say they’ll no longer pursue a constitutional amendment on ballot initiatives, and what states like Utah are doing to reduce the number of chronically absent students.
“This is truly bizarre behavior by the federal agency that is supposed to be protecting civil rights.” — Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, on a DOJ letter threatening criminal prosecution for resisting the agency’s demands for private voter data.
NYU law professor Melissa Murray, Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson and businessman Mark Cuban discuss a hypothetical voting scenario on an episode of “Breaking the Deadlock” on WGBH, filmed at the New York Historical Society in New York, NY on May 31, 2026. (Daniel Sircar/WGBH)
By Alixel Cabrera
As part of a hypothetical scenario in a PBS episode, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson was asked what she would do if a fictional president pressured her to hand over private voter information and wanted to seize ballots before they were counted.
The same day the episode aired, Henderson said in a social media post she had received “another love letter” from the DOJ “sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution” for resisting the agency’s demands for private voter data.
Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, (left) and House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, announce Republican lawmakers’ plans to appeal the state’s court-ordered congressional map to the Utah Supreme Court during a news conference at the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City on Nov. 25, 2025. (Photo by Marco Lozzi for Utah News Dispatch)
By Katie McKellar
Though Utah’s Republican state leaders previously said they were likely to pursue another attempt to change the Utah Constitution to ensure Utah voters’ ballot initiative power was “co-equal” with the Legislature’s power, they’ve changed course — for now.
Instead, Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz said lawmakers will wait for the courts to settle ongoing litigation that pushed the issue to the forefront in the first place: a yearslong anti-gerrymandering lawsuit over whether Utahns had the power to create an independent redistricting process and ban partisan gerrymandering when voters passed Proposition 4 in 2018.
A student reads at his desk in Oregon. The state and at least five others enacted laws this year aiming to reduce chronic absenteeism. (Photo by Alex Baumhardt/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
STATELINE
By Robbie Sequeira
This year, at least six states — including Utah — enacted laws trying to reduce the number of students chronically absent from school.
A new Utah law creates a student attendance monitoring system and requires the identification of at-risk students. Parents of students in grades 1-6 will receive a notice of violation after five truancies. If parents don’t meet with school officials to address the truancy, they could face a class B misdemeanor.
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