Phil Lyman says records should be released to resolve election questions; alleges tens of thousands of problematic votes

Phil Lyman, a GOP congressional candidate and former state legislator, used a Utah County Republican Party podcast interview to press for public access to election records and to restate longstanding concerns about ballot and voter-list transparency.

Lyman said the legislature and its committees were denied routine access to voter rolls and cast-vote records, citing what he described as contractual language with a vendor that he said directed officials to deny such requests and force litigation. "In their agreement...if the legislature asks to see the voter rolls, deny them and make them sue," Lyman said on the podcast.

He also repeated an estimate he said he had made publicly that there could be roughly "40,000 fake votes or flipped votes" in a contested primary, framing the number as an audacious hypothesis that could be disproved if cast-vote records were made available. "The thing is I could be proven wrong so easily just by pulling out the cast-for record," he said, urging officials to disclose records so the public can verify turnout and anomalies.

Lyman described efforts while serving on the state government operations committee to subpoena records and said the committee lacked enforcement mechanisms and faced legal and contractual obstacles. He also cited what he characterized as statistical irregularities that, in his account, raised questions about turnout rates in specific precincts.

The podcast did not include on-air responses from county clerks, the lieutenant governor's office or the voting systems vendor Lyman referenced. Those entities were not quoted or represented in the interview.

Election officials and legal experts were not on the podcast to respond to Lyman's assertions. The claims about record denials and any specific numerical irregularities reported by Lyman are his statements; they are not independently corroborated in this interview and would require inspection of the cited records and contracts to verify.