Utah Legislature tries to throw out new congressional map

The Utah Legislature attempted last week to prevent the state’s new court-ordered congressional maps from going into effect based on “boundary issues” identified by the Lieutenant Governor’s Office.

Legislative defendants in the state’s redistricting case asked 3rd District Court Judge Dianna Gibson to stay her Nov. 10 ruling, arguing that the state cannot properly resolve its constitutional dilemma in time for candidates to qualify for the 2026 midterm elections.

Republican officials have yet to follow through with their promise to appeal Gibson’s decision, which disrupted Utah politics by overriding the Legislature’s constitutional map-drawing authority.

Gibson instead chose a map, drawn by the interest groups who brought the case, that almost guarantees a Democratic seat for the U.S. House of Representatives in Salt Lake County.

In interviews with the Deseret News, House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, and Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said they support an emergency appeal to the Utah Supreme Court to reverse the outcome, but Gibson’s delayed decision made it difficult to ask the court to swap maps yet again.

This did not stop the state’s attorneys from seeking a reversal on Wednesday after Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson asked the court to clarify how to proceed with the new map which inadvertently sliced several houses in half and cut multiple county corners in two.

What problems did the new map have?

After comparing it to satellite images, Utah’s election office identified eight boundary issues with the court-ordered map, provided by the plaintiffs in the case, which include the League of Women Voters of Utah and Mormon Women for Ethical Government.

The issues included boundaries that bisected homes in Alpine, Highland, Huntsville, Orem and near the mouth of Little Cottonwood Canyon; and that separated small sections of Salt Lake, Summit and Utah counties due to residences incorporated or built since the 2020 census.

“Every new redistricting map has minor technical problems that need boundary adjustments,” Henderson told the Deseret News in a statement. “This is not unusual and is part of the process of implementing a new map.”

Henderson’s statement came with one major caveat. Unlike the typical redistricting process, this was conducted by a judge, requiring Henderson to seek clarification on boundary issues from Gibson, she said, instead of from the Legislature.

A day after Henderson’s inquiry, legislative defendants filed a legal motion claiming her request “amplifies how these proceedings have transgressed the Utah and U.S. Constitutions” by forcing elected officials to defer to a judge for clarification every time there is a problem with Utah’s electoral boundaries.

Speaking on behalf of lawmakers in the GOP majority, attorneys argued the plaintiffs’ map did not pass through the rigorous public process outlined in the state’s anti-gerrymandering law known as Proposition 4 — which is the same reason why Utah’s 2021 maps were thrown out, according to defendants.

In a statement to the Deseret News, Utah Rep. Candice Pierucci, R-Riverton, who served on the Legislative Redistricting Committee, said the plaintiffs’ boundary issues highlight the fundamental problem with the series of court rulings that took map-drawing out of the Legislature’s hands.

“This is what you get when a judge lets special-interest groups draw maps in the dark with no process, no transparency, and no accountability to the people who actually live here,” Pierucci said.

“Utahns deserve better than a map built on political gamesmanship and judicial overreach. We’ll keep fighting for a map that’s constitutional, fair, and created through a real public process.”

How did the judge fix the issues with the map?

Plaintiffs pushed back forcefully in legal filings of their own, pointing out that Utah’s 2021 congressional boundaries, and the map lawmakers proposed in October to comply with Proposition 4, both had more issues than the plaintiffs’ map.

The boundary issues identified by election workers had nothing to do with the plaintiffs’ map-drawing process because the problems emerged only when comparing the map to present-day municipalities, and both sides had agreed to draw, and analyze, maps based on the 2020 census, according to the plaintiffs’ attorneys.

Plaintiffs questioned why, if they were so intent on reversing Gibson’s ruling, GOP lawmakers had not initiated an emergency appellate process already, and were instead using an unrelated legal question regarding technical details to re-litigate their constitutional argument.

On Friday, Gibson issued an order saying she would follow the advice of the plaintiffs, who suggested that the court should resolve seven of the eight boundary issues by simply lumping the bisected homes and city segments in with their assigned “census blocks” from 2020.

While this solution would require no changes to the plaintiffs’ map, the final issue — a single-home precinct in Sandy that could jeopardize voter privacy — will be fixed by implementing the plaintiffs’ recommendations of keeping all of Sandy together, while dividing up Midvale in a new way to keep the populations of districts equal.

“The Legislature’s attempt to seize on these technical map adjustments as an excuse to ‘stay’ this case is just another example of their unwillingness to accept the choice of the people and the ruling of the court,” said Katharine Biele, president of the League of Women Voters of Utah, in a statement to the Deseret News.

Gibson did not address the legislative defendants’ request for a stay on Friday. This analysis, which will include legal reasoning for Friday’s order, will be published “as soon as possible,” Gibson wrote.