House Majority Whip Karianne Lisonbee, R-Syracuse, wants to give an election conspiracy theorist with ties to Sidney Powell and Mike Lindell access to personal information about millions of Utahns, including voter registration and tax data.
Lisonbee’s HB332 would end Utah’s participation in the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a partnership among states to prevent voter fraud. Several Republican states withdrew from ERIC last year due to election conspiracy theories. In 2024, Utah Republicans passed a handful of resolutions calling for withdrawal from ERIC. The bill would only allow Utah to share voter information with another state with legislative approval.
Lisonbee’s bill authorizes the lieutenant governor to contract a third-party company to help maintain the state’s voter registration database. But there’s a curious and specific requirement for the company — the use of “quantum technology.”
That specific provision appears to clear the field for Jay Valentine, who is pushing his “fractal quantum technology” to fill the void left by ERIC in several states.
Valentine is an election conspiracy theorist who has worked closely with lawyer Sidney Powell, who played a prominent role in Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss. The Texas Tribune reported that Valentine’s technology was initially funded by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who has frequently spread conspiracy theories about nonexistent election fraud.
Valentine has made several outlandish claims about the abilities of his quantum technology. For instance, he has said it found over 1.4 million voters in Pennsylvania using illegal addresses.
Lisonbee’s proposal would not only give Valentine access to Utah’s voter registration database, but also directs other state agencies to cough up massive amounts of Utahns’ personal information that is not related to elections — motor vehicle and property tax information from the State Tax Commission and Medicaid application records from the Division of Workforce Services.
It’s probably not a coincidence that Lisonbee’s legislation appears to clear the way for Valentine to clean up Utah’s voter database.
In May, Lisonbee met with Valentine and House Speaker Mike Schultz at the Utah Capitol to discuss his technology. That meeting was brokered by Jen Brown, the president of the far-right group Utah Citizens for the Constitution. Brown, a member of the Legislature’s Federalism Commission, latched on to several voter fraud-related conspiracies in the run-up to the 2024 election.
“Why wouldn’t we use the latest tools to clean voter rolls? If someone really wants a fair election, there would be transparency and an effort to use the available tools to ensure clean voter rolls,” Brown posted on Telegram.
“If quantum technology is finding tens of thousands of anomalies in other states, why would Utah be any different?”
Lisonbee did not respond to requests for an explanation about why she thinks it’s a good idea to give Valentine access to Utahns’ personal information.
Valentine was a featured speaker at an October conference hosted by Brown’s organization, where he claimed without evidence that leftist NGOs were somehow “harvesting” mail-in ballots to commit voter fraud.
“We have mail-in ballots that are legitimate ballots going to legitimate people at legitimate addresses, but those addresses are undeliverable. Those ballots are being harvested by NGOs, and they’re being voted by those NGOs for leftist candidates,” Valentine said.
Schultz is pushing to severely limit Utah’s universal vote-by-mail system this year. He has thrown his support behind HB300, which would require voters who receive a ballot in the mail to return it to a polling place and show valid identification.
Schultz did not respond to questions about whether his conversations with Valentine played any part in his decision to push for changes to Utah’s universal vote-by-mail.
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