Salt Lake City, UT — In a victory for Utah voters, the Utah Supreme Court allowed Utah voters to move forward with their claim that the Legislature illegally gutted a citizen-led anti-gerrymandering initiative.
Represented by Campaign Legal Center, the League of Women Voters of Utah (LWVUT), Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG) and seven individual voters filed a lawsuit in 2022 challenging the state’s congressional redistricting map as an extreme partisan gerrymander and asking the Court to reinstate the core governmental reforms removed from a citizen-led initiative that established an independent redistricting commission, binding anti-gerrymandering requirements and a private right of action for voters to challenge maps in court.
CLC partnered with Utah attorneys from Parr Brown Gee & Loveless and Zimmerman Booher to file the lawsuit.
“Today’s decision is a win for democracy,” said Mark Gaber, senior director, redistricting, at Campaign Legal Center. “Voters should always be the ones to choose their politicians, not the other way around. Instead of following this basic democratic principle, the Utah Legislature blatantly ignored the will of Utah’s voters to lock in their own power. CLC is proud to have fought hard so every Utahns’ voice can be heard. The Utah Supreme Court has set an example for state courts across the country, that legislatures cannot override the people when they act to require fair maps.”
“The League’s mission is to empower voters. Fair districts are the linchpin to that right. The League has worked on redistricting for almost 50 years, and today we are both relieved and optimistic about the future for Utah voters. We witnessed a court that took the time to consider this important matter and had studied the many difficult issues involved. In the end, the justices came out in support of the voter, whose voices should not be silenced by their public representatives,” said Katharine Biele, President of the League of Women Voters of Utah.
“We applaud today’s ruling protecting Utah voters’ constitutional right to reform their government. This decision affirms the power of citizens to shape legislation directly, ensuring that the voices of Utahns are heard and respected by the legislature. MWEG members are women inspired by our faith to defend ethical government, regardless of political party, and we look forward to continuing to advocate for fair districts in Utah,” said Jessica Larson, MWEG Senior Director of Advocacy.
In 2018, Utah voters passed a bipartisan citizen initiative, Proposition 4. Among other reforms, the initiative prohibited partisan gerrymandering and established the Utah Independent Redistricting Commission (Commission). Independent redistricting commissions protect democracy by ensuring voters, not partisan politicians, draw electoral districts.
In 2020, the Utah Legislature disobeyed voters and repealed Proposition 4 to replace it with SB 200, which allowed partisan gerrymandering and discarded the binding redistricting criteria. As a result, the Republican majority of the Utah Legislature drew a congressional map that served their own political party’s self-interests, instead of the interests of voters. Before the Commission could even finish its work, the Legislature disregarded the Commission’s findings and devised their own extreme partisan gerrymandered map, which locked in one party of Utah’s congressional delegation for the next decade while silencing voters with minority political viewpoints.
The Utah Legislature’s map exemplifies how a ruling political party can skew the electoral process by “cracking” voters from the minority party into multiple congressional districts to dilute their voting power. The map carves up Salt Lake County, home to Utah’s largest concentration of non-Republican voters, among all four congressional districts — reliably ensuring that there are no competitive districts in Utah’s congressional delegation for the foreseeable future.
The case will now return to the District Court to allow the challenge to proceed.
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