- Utah has lost ground compared to other states in terms of civic engagement, with decreased public meeting attendance since 2019.
- Voter turnout remains high, but Utah's national ranking fell as other states adopted mail-in voting.
- Utah gives less to advocacy groups, preferring charity and religious donations.
SALT LAKE CITY — Utah has lost ground compared to the rest of the nation when it comes to the level of civic engagement in recent years, according to a new report from the Utah Foundation.
The report — part of the foundation's series focusing on "social capital" in the Beehive State — tracked three metrics of civic engagement: voter turnout, public meeting attendance and donations to advocacy groups. Utah's overall and relative public meeting attendance has decreased since 2019 and although the state's voter turnout has remained high since universal vote-by-mail was established last decade, the state has fallen in the national rankings as others have caught up, the report finds.
Utah has long been below the national average of giving to advocacy groups, though this is likely because Utahns prefer to donate to charity — the state is consistently one of the most generous when it comes to charitable giving.
While the report only looked at a few metrics, they could show a broader sense of disconnection from communities and highlight where Utah can improve, said Shawn Teigen, Utah Foundation president.
If we are not engaged in our community and if we're not engaged in the folks that are guiding our community, then we probably don't care about a lot of other aspects of the community.
–Utah Foundation President Shawn Teigen
"If we are not engaged in our community and if we're not engaged in the folks that are guiding our community, then we probably don't care about a lot of other aspects of the community," he told KSL.com. He described civic engagement as "basically one way of getting people excited about the place they live."
Utah was an early adopter of mail-in voting, which helped it go from near the bottom of the pack before 2016 to 13th in 2018, according to Teigen. More states have adopted the practice in recent years, placing Utah's voter turnout among eligible voters in the middle of the pack in the most recent election, according to data from the University of Florida Election Lab.
About half of Utah voters want to see the state's universal vote-by-mail system continue, but lawmakers approved changes that, by 2029, will require voters to opt in to receive a mail-in ballot. That change could lower turnout in future elections if voters who otherwise would have voted forget to request a ballot or are unaware of the change, but Teigen said it's too early to know the impact, given the popularity of mail-in voting in Utah.
"Who the heck knows?" he said. "Maybe people are a little bit more comfortable with mail-in voting ... and say, 'Oh yeah, I can get behind this and I'm going to try to make sure that I receive my ballot going forward.'"
Utah wasn't always a top state when it comes to voter turnout, but it has consistently been among the states with the highest percentage of people who show up to public meetings — ranking as high as third in 2019, when 18% of Utahns reported public meeting attendance. The nation saw a drop in 2020 and 2021, likely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but Utah's drop was steeper and it has yet to recover to the same highs posted several years ago.
"We've always been higher than average across the nation, it's just that sometimes we're quite a bit higher and now we're just a couple percentage points higher," Teigen said. "It's possible that COVID kind of bumped us out of those meetings and now we've kind of (returned) at a pretty good rate, but just not at the rate that we had been in previous decades."
Utah has been among the bottom 10 states in giving to advocacy groups, according to data from the Internal Revenue Service Business Master File, dating back to at least 2009. The state had only about 30 cents given per $1,000 of personal income in 2022, below the national average of $1.78. That's the second-lowest amount among neighboring states, ahead of only Nevada.
That is likely driven by Utah's high rate of giving to charities, as well as giving to religious organizations like The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
"When we look at volunteerism and when we look at giving to other nonadvocacy organizations, I think Utah does very well," Teigen said.
