Utah gubernatorial hopeful Phil Lyman had his hopes dashed on August 13 by the state’s supreme court, which threw out Lyman’s attempt to have Governor Spencer Cox removed from office.
Lyman, a Utah state representative, won the state’s GOP convention nomination in April by taking 67 percent of the caucus votes, but he lost in the later June Republican primary. Utah has a complicated system that involves both convention and primary votes.
In the later primary, now-Governor Cox bested Lyman by nine points, which amounted to 37,000 more votes, leaving the score at 54 percent for Cox and 45 percent for Lyman.
Utah allows candidates to get listed on the primary ballot if they go through the caucusing gauntlet and collect a sufficient number of signatures. Lyman’s complaint against Cox is about signatures; he questions whether all of them were valid. In addition, Lyman argued that the Utah Republican party’s own rules say that he should have won, since the rules say that any candidate getting more than 60 percent of the vote at the state party convention will become the party’s nominee.
But the state’s Supreme Court disagreed, reaffirming that state law is supreme over any privately drafted rules by organizations like political parties. A parties “internal rules” cannot “override state election law,” the court wrote.
Reacting to the decision, Deidre Henderson, Lieutenant Governor, said Lyman’s claim was “frivolous.” She was also a target in Lyman’s complaint, which asked for her to be removed from her office as well. Henderson said Lyman is hypocritical for banging on about election integrity when he was, she said, the candidate who tried to steal an election because he lost the race.
Lyman seems undaunted, saying in a statement this week that he’s going to run in the November gubernatorial election as a write-in candidate. He said both Cox and Henderson “continue to obstruct access” to the details of who signed their nomination petitions, leaving him and everyone unable to verify the signatures.
Because of this and other records Lyman says are being unfairly withheld, he has questions about the “entire apparatus” of what he calls “corrupt establishment politicians” who want to hold on to power without being overseen or be held accountable.
