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Utah County Clerk-elect Aaron Davidson sits for a portrait at the clerk's office on Dec. 22, 2022.

Harrison Epstein, Daily Herald

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Utah County Clerk Aaron Davidson speaks after taking the oath of office during a swearing-in ceremony held at the Utah County Historic Courthouse in Provo on Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2022.

Harrison Epstein, Daily Herald file photo

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On Tuesday, Aaron Davidson took the oath of office for the first time, being sworn in as the first Utah County clerk.

He is the first full-time clerk for Utah County, since the Utah County Commission voted in December 2021 to divide the Clerk/Auditor’s Office in two. The roles were placed on the ballot for the first time at the county GOP primary last April and the general election ballot in November.

For Davidson, it hasn’t been a direct line through his life into politics. He originally earned two master’s degrees from Brigham Young University, one in accounting and another in business administration. He went on to work for now-PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the world’s big four accounting firms, in management consulting.

From there, it’s been a series of different jobs and worlds — the “seven-year itch” as Davidson says — taking him from systems implementation to consulting, managing a home building company and owning a chocolate company.

Things changed for Davidson, though, in 2020. He became more active in protesting mask mandates before the presidential election was held that November.

“I’m not sure if anything really happened or didn’t happen, but it’s just, government officials were always saying, ‘Believe us. … It was an honest and true election.’ … They always just kind of said believe us, but didn’t really produce the data,” he told the Daily Herald.

Davidson ran for clerk, he says, to produce the data and “be honest and transparent — whether it’s one way or the other, I really don’t care.”

Marriage licenses in particular drew attention during the campaign for the clerk’s office. Jake Oaks, the other listed candidate for the position from the Independent American Party, swore that if he were elected he wouldn’t give marriage licenses to same-sex couples in contrast with federal law.

As for same-sex couples, Davidson took aim at the constitutionality of Oaks’ proposal while expounding on the history of issuing marriage licenses in the United States.

“I disagree with not giving marriages to same-sex couples. So yes, I am going to — if someone comes to the marriage license (office), anyone, for any reason, could get a license to be married,” Davidson said. “My responsibility as the clerk is to do what the Legislature tells me I’m supposed to do. Right now, I’m to issue marriage licenses to same-sex or different-sex couples. … I will abide by what is the standard practice right now.”

Davidson also credits Oaks for making him take a deeper look at the marriage license portion of the position.

“Jake made me start to really look at marriage licenses and look in-depth as to why are we issuing marriage licenses. And since we do issue marriage licenses, you have to treat people equally,” Davidson said. “So, you know, if I treated same-sex couples differently, if the next clerk that came in was in a gay marriage I wouldn’t want him to treat, you know, opposite-sex marriages differently than he treated gay-sex marriages. So I’m going to treat everyone equal on equal grounds.”

Davidson, meanwhile, campaigned on getting rid of the online marriage portal, which allows people to apply for marriage licenses from around the world.

He told the Daily Herald, though, that he has not yet made a decision about the future of the portal.

“I’m gonna take a deep look at it. I can’t say which way I’m going to go. I have some beliefs of which way I might go,” he said. Davidson added that he has questions over the responsibility Utah County would have in these marriages and if they are “taking away the sovereignty of other countries” among others.

While marriage licenses were a focal point of the clerk’s race in Utah County, the position is typically known for overseeing local elections.

Davidson has also publicly questioned the results of the 2020 presidential election won by Joe Biden. He told the Daily Herald that the Utah County clerk’s processes are secure and proper in terms of elections.

“Are there any exterior influences on the process? I don’t know. And I won’t say that there is, I won’t say that there isn’t — I’ll look at it,” Davidson said.

This leaves him now in the office he and others have criticized in recent years and, potentially, as the subject of ire from ideological allies.

“People are so anxious, they want to believe and know that something wrong happened. And so I kind of feel like a little bit of pressure to find something, you know. But now I’m looking at it and thinking, ‘Well, what if I don’t,” he said.

He went on to say that he would support bringing in third-party statisticians to look through the data, particularly for the GOP primaries. Not releasing data is one area he believes Josh Daniels, the former clerk/auditor, could have improved, saying Daniels should have made more of the information available to people.

“I’m not going to release people’s names. I might release their names to like the precinct chair. Because the precinct chair should have their names anyway. And I won’t release how they voted. But I might release that these people voted,” Davidson said. “Maybe a summary to the precinct chair or vice chair, so that they can take another look at it and say, ‘Yeah, I think (in) my precinct that’s about how they would have voted.’ But if they feel differently, they can do some canvassing to verify the person voted.”

He did go on to say that smaller precincts would not receive the same kind of reports to protect people’s anonymity, that there would need to be a yet-to-be-determined population threshold.

Now in office, he plans to focus on voter rolls as the first priority, particularly to assuage the worries of people who may have received multiple ballots in the mail.

While the first to admit he’s coming into the office without direct experience, he explains that his experience in system technologies and as a consultant will help translate into work with the clerk’s office.

Moving forward, he expresses hope that people’s lives won’t be directly change by his holding office and that he will not operate with a partisan agenda.

“I don’t operate on strict black and white lines; there are some gray areas, and I say that between liberal thought or conservative thought — I can have some liberal thought, I can have some conservative thought,” he said.