Whoever wins the Utah County Clerk’s race in November inherits an office still recovering from a turbulent term, one that ended Aaron Davidson’s bid for reelection in the June primary. The next clerk also walks straight into two major changes: a new statewide voter registration system and the shift from automatic vote-by-mail to an opt-in system. Republican Corey Astill, first profiled in UTElection.info’s March look at the race, argues the job is fundamentally about management and competence. Russ Rampton, running with the Forward Party, has spent the last six years working inside the clerk’s office. Here is where each of them stands.
Corey Astill: Competence as Institutional Design
Background: Republican candidate for Utah County Clerk; former Chief of Staff at the Joint Economic Committee; worked for four U.S. Senators and two congressional committees; operated two behavioral health clinics; District 51 Legislative Chair. Website: coreyastill.com
UTElection.info first profiled Astill in Utah County Clerk: Restoring Process and Trust in a Narrowed Field, where he described the clerk’s office as a management-intensive service provider rather than a policy maker. In a written update for this piece, Astill reflected on what the campaign itself has taught him.
Voters and Competence
Astill says one-on-one conversations have convinced him that people are more interesting than politics usually gives them credit for. Most voters, he argues, aren’t thinking in terms of ideology. They care whether institutions work, whether people are honest with them, whether someone will answer the phone, and whether the people running things know what they’re doing. The campaign has reinforced his belief that competence matters more than people sometimes admit.
Institutional Design and Trust
Astill describes good government as, at least in part, good institutional design: systems that make the right things easy, make mistakes visible, create accountability, and reward people for producing good outcomes. He acknowledges that sounds mundane next to the big ideological arguments, but argues it is foundational to whether people trust institutions. The biggest lesson the campaign has reinforced for him is to take the world as it is rather than as you wish it were, starting with an honest assessment of how people actually behave, how institutions actually function, and what incentives actually exist, then figuring out what can realistically be improved. He says that applies to government just as much as it does to business.
Asked what inspires him, Astill pointed to people who take responsibility for things they don’t have to: volunteers, board members, business owners, youth coaches, poll workers, and people who show up to meetings or simply try to make the institutions around them work a little better. Most of them never get much recognition, he said, and he finds them more inspiring than political celebrity.
Books Astill said he has recently read or is currently reading:
- Moneyball by Michael Lewis (a reread). Astill says the book struck him differently during the campaign. What interests him isn’t the baseball but how institutions become attached to conventional wisdom and resist information that challenges it, asking “Are we measuring the things that really matter, or just the things that are easiest to measure?”
Russ Rampton: The Insider From the Marriage Counter
Background: Forward Party candidate for Utah County Clerk; six years in the Utah County Clerk’s Office, primarily in marriage licenses and passports; previously taught writing and small group communication on short-term contracts at Weber State University, Utah State University and Neumont. Website: russjrampton.com Contact: russ@russjrampton.com
Before moving to Provo in 2020, Rampton taught on short-term contracts in northern Utah after the circumstances weren’t right to pursue a PhD. For most of his six years in the clerk’s office he has worked in marriage and passports, and he describes an unspoken arrangement at work: he handles the marriage side’s rapid growth and doesn’t talk about elections. That growth has been substantial. He says the office issued about 32,000 marriage licenses last year, is on track for 40,000 this year, and is budgeting for 48,000 next year, growth of 20% to 25% a year. By applicant, roughly a third are from Utah, a third from elsewhere in the U.S., and a third from outside the country. Destination weddings are a notable, if not huge, share: couples get a license online and then marry in person at places like Zion National Park, and he mentioned one photographer who sells hiking elopement and desert photography packages built around them. The officiant, he notes, has to be in Utah.
Party and the Path to the Ballot
Rampton ran for the office four years ago as a Republican and lost at convention. This time, he says, he couldn’t run under the Republican banner given how the party, nationally and locally, approaches election policy, and he didn’t have the money to gather signatures. He joined the Forward Party around the time it merged with the United Utah Party, says he sees himself in all of its values, and calls it a much better fit. Rampton notes that Astill has a lot of connections and has raised more than $100,000, while nobody recruited Rampton or offered him help; he is still drawing on leftovers from his campaign four years ago. He announced early so that Democrats would not run their own candidate, pointing out that the long caucus and signature timeline forces candidates to commit well ahead of the election.
Rule of Law Over Party
Rampton’s first priority is allegiance to the rule of law over any partisan agenda, including laws he disagrees with. The clerk, he says, runs elections according to the law, and that starts with learning and understanding the law and training staff on it to address the findings of the recent audit of the Utah County Clerk’s Office. He considers HB 300, the election law the Legislature passed in 2025, a good compromise bill, pointing out that everybody can find something in it that helps. He opposes the federal SAVE Act.
Outreach and the Changes Ahead
Voter outreach is his second priority. People don’t notice when it’s missing, he says, but it is hard for people to trust what they don’t understand, and while people understand voting, they don’t understand election administration. He wants the office to encourage people to return ballots early and points to Weber County’s social media outreach as a model. He also wants to restore the instructional videos that were removed when Davidson took office. His goal is to post a picture from every drop box in the county. He notes that Utah County originally paid for return postage because it didn’t want to pay for drop boxes, and that state code now requires every municipality to have them. He argues the office can promote drop boxes without making voting harder, and people can still vote in person if they want to.
His third priority is preparing for two changes he says are certain. First, the state will transition to a new voter registration system, and he argues January 2027 is the time to do it, with plenty of runway before the next election; he has already worked through major updates to the marriage license system. Second, vote-by-mail will shift from automatic to opt-in: instead of the county automatically mailing every voter a ballot, voters will need to opt in to receive one, and renew that choice every eight years. He says people should be able to do that online and that the current clerk hasn’t yet told people how.
More broadly, he says the office needs to reexamine how it does things after Davidson’s tenure, asking, for example, why candidates can’t file for office online. Utah County still relies on paper forms for candidate filings while Salt Lake County handles them digitally, and he argues digital forms are more efficient, not least because they eliminate the problem of poor handwriting. He wants ongoing training and investment in employees. It’s cool to get married in Grandma’s wedding dress, he says, but foolish to apply for a marriage license the same way she did.
Signatures, Security and Access
Rampton argues in-person voting isn’t inherently more efficient: it takes a worker about 3 seconds to verify a signature, while it takes him 30 seconds just to pull out his ID. He compares election security to hand sanitizer. It doesn’t kill every germ, and elections aren’t perfect, but accuracy is “deep in the 9s.” You could kill 100% of germs with something like acid or fire, he says, but it would leave you badly damaged. The question he asks is how many voters get disenfranchised to stop one person from voting illegally. He would take 20% more people voting even at the cost of losing the 1.5% whose signatures are rejected, and says an election can be a bad night for a candidate and a good night for democracy.
He points to a familiar Utah County example: a parent whose child is away serving an LDS mission signs the child’s ballot instead of sending it on to them. When a signature matches a parent’s better than the voter’s own, it is rejected and a cure notice goes out, which also points out that signing someone else’s ballot is voter fraud, a felony. Rampton suggests the marriage office’s verification method, a current ID and a live face match, could potentially be used for curing ballots.
Technology and Truth
Rampton says the office is starting to use AI more to revise the writing of internal documents and policies. He compares it to a calculator, which lets people do higher-order math without getting hung up on arithmetic. AI can do in 30 seconds what would take 30 minutes, he says, but it doesn’t replace human decision-making. The first pass of signature comparisons is already done by a machine, which he says still needs spot checks. There is no reason not to use the tool, in his view, but it has to be used wisely.
Asked what inspires him, Rampton pointed to his sense of justice: injustice is a problem, and he tries to correct it.
Books Rampton said he has recently read or is currently reading:
- The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay
- Reset: How to Change What’s Not Working by Dan Heath, which he says he would have every employee in the office read