Four potential changes to the Utah Constitution will appear on your ballot when it comes in the mail next week, but don’t believe your eyes. It’s a Halloween trick. Two of them aren’t really there.
Thanks to separate rulings in state courts, you can vote for or against them to your heart’s content, but it won’t count. They are mere words on paper.
It may be fair to call this the year of ghost amendments in Utah elections.
Amendment D, which would have allowed lawmakers to change, amend or void any citizen initiative voters had approved, was stricken because legislative leaders wrote a misleading description of it on the ballot, and because they failed to publish notice of the amendment two months before the election in newspapers statewide.
Amendment A, which would have removed the roughly eight-decades-old earmark that gave all Utah income tax collections to public and higher education (and a few social programs), met the same fate this week because it, too, wasn’t properly advertised in newspapers.