# Deidre Henderson **Deidre Henderson** (Republican) is the **Lieutenant Governor of Utah**, elected in 2020 on a ticket with Governor [[Spencer Cox]] and serving since January 2021. Under Utah law the lieutenant governor is also the state's **chief election officer**, giving Henderson direct authority over the administration of Utah's elections — the role that placed her at the center of a 2026 confrontation with the Trump [[Department of Justice]]. Before her statewide office she served in the Utah State Senate from 2013 to 2021, representing a district south of Salt Lake City. She is a conservative Republican, which makes her resistance to the DOJ's 2026 voter-data demands notable: the pushback came not from a partisan opponent of the administration but from a Republican state official defending her state's control over its own voter rolls. ## KB significance: the DOJ voter-data confrontation Henderson became a named figure in the 2026 election-machinery fight when the [[Department of Justice]] pressed states to hand over private voter data and to run their rolls against federal citizenship databases. When [[Harmeet Dhillon]]'s Civil Rights Division sent letters to election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia in July 2026 — warning of criminal prosecution and imposing a five-day compliance deadline (see [[SAVE Act]] and [[Harmeet Dhillon]]) — Henderson was among the chief election officers targeted. She refused to turn over protected voter data, noting that courts had already ruled such demands illegal, and released only the voter-registration information already available to the public. Her office's own audit of Utah's rolls had found only a "small handful" of noncitizens among more than two million registered voters — a finding consistent with the broader evidence that noncitizen voting is statistically negligible and that the DOJ campaign was a pressure instrument, not a fraud remedy. Henderson's public response — describing the DOJ's letter as a "love letter" laced with prosecution threats and calling the agency's conduct "truly bizarre" — became one of the sharpest on-the-record rebukes of the campaign from within the president's own party. See [[Deidre Henderson - love letter from the DOJ]] for the full receipt. ## See Also - [[Harmeet Dhillon]] - [[SAVE Act]] - [[Voter Suppression]] - [[Election Assistance Commission]] - [[Spencer Cox]]