For instance Utah is ranked as “Above Average” yet Utah’s elections are so secretive that the State web site refuses to even publicly post any state-wide precinct-level election results!

To obtain the state-wide election results in Utah by precinct one has to go to all 29 counties and *try* to get them that way (and they can charge $25 each if they want to) or make a formal government records request, wait two weeks, pay $25 and then *after* the election is certified one receives the vote counts. If anything looks suspicious – too bad cause it’s too late.

And of course there is no possibility of obtaining the precinct counts broken out by ballot type – absentee, early, provisional, and election day – so that it is trivially easy for any insider to pad votes for one candidate in one vote type while subtracting votes for an opposing candidate in another ballot type – and added together any hint of the problems conveniently vanishes before the results are made public.

As well Utah open records laws do not apply to any election records so that the entire process is secret in Utah – and always has been. In fact even when paper ballots were hand counted in the polling locations, the public were never allowed to observe.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that Utah may be the most secretive state with respect to the conduct of its elections in the entire US.

Apparently this ranking system does not care if even the vote counts themselves are kept secret by a state.

Just what criteria I wonder were important to this ranking system?