A coalition of Democratic groups in Colorado is working to get redistricting initiatives on the ballot this election year.
In conversation with the Deseret News, Hannah Ledford of the Fairness Project, one of the groups involved, said they are asking “voters whether or not they want to temporarily disband their independent redistricting commission to adopt maps that have been filed alongside these ballot measures.”
The ballot proposal would draw a new congressional map for the 2028 and 2030 congressional elections before reverting to the redistricting commission after the 2030 census.
To account for legal challenges, Coloradans for a Level Playing Field has filed four versions of the ballot initiative that include the same map, with plans to get just one of the proposals on the ballot.
If passed, the initiative would help Democrats possibly pick up three additional House seats in Colorado, where the congressional election is currently evenly split 4-4 between Democrats and Republicans.
Ledford said the latest measure out of Colorado would allow Democrats to pick up a few more seats in the House, turning the 3rd, 5th, and 8th congressional districts bluer. The 4th Congressional District, currently held by Rep. Lauren Boebert, would continue to be a Republican stronghold.
It’s similar to the efforts carried out in California, Maryland and Virginia to engage in mid-decade redistricting following the Trump administration’s attempts to encourage red states in “mid-decade redistricting to pack Congress in their favor this year,” said Ledford.
Maps are typically drawn up once a decade, following the census. But several states have looked at redrawing boundary lines ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Republicans push back in Utah, Colorado
Advance Colorado, an advocacy group, filed six ballot measures to counter the move late last week.
“The gist of it is adding criteria around competitiveness and not allowing maps to be drawn to benefit one political party,” Michael Field of Advance Colorado told Colorado Politics. Field said that if voters were asked to choose “between a hyperpartisan map and an independent map, they would choose the independent one.”
Many of the measures would require any map changes to obtain approval from the redistricting commission and the Colorado Supreme Court. One of them bans gerrymandering in favor of one political party.
But former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who is chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, spoke out in support of the attempt to gerrymander in a statement, saying, “Republicans have demonstrated that their mid-decade gerrymanders will not end after the 2026 midterms, and in the face of that continued threat, Colorado is taking a responsible step by asking the voters to weigh in on the state’s temporary response. Let’s be clear: Colorado did not choose this fight.”
But Colorado will fight back, he said. Others, like Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, have stayed out of the redistricting debate.
Utah’s own battle over redistricting came to a head when a federal court rejected an attempt by the state’s Republicans to block a congressional map chosen by a district judge, which includes a heavily Democratic district. Right now, all four congressional seats in the Beehive State are held by Republicans.
In hopes of countering the court ruling, Utahns for Representative Government, led by Utah GOP chair Rob Axson, submitted more than 225,000 signatures for a 2026 ballot initiative aimed at dissolving the independent redistricting commission and returning the map-drawing authority to the state Legislature.
The signatures are still being verified.
A national partisan war
Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a professor at Harvard Law School, in conversation with Votebeat earlier this month, said the unfolding situation is “totally unprecedented in the modern era.”
“You have to go back to the Gilded Age to see this much discretionary redrawing of maps,” he said.
“Individual states have done this before, but not in the context of a national partisan war,” added Justin Levitt, another professor at Loyola Law School.
Voters in Colorado and Utah will ultimately decide how they want to be represented in November.
This debate started in July 2025 with Texas, where redistricting could give Republicans an advantage. A month later, California Democrats countered with their own redistricting proposal.
Since then, Republicans have redrawn maps in their favor in North Carolina and Missouri, while Democrats accomplished the same in Virginia and Maryland. Some of those efforts are still caught up in court.
Several dozen other states are still considering redistricting proposals.
“They fought it hard in California. They’re fighting it hard in Virginia, too,” Ledford in Colorado said. “But I think at the end of the day, we have voters on our side.”
“These are not politicians drawing maps or making decisions behind voters’ backs like they did in some other states,” she said.
“This is democracy, direct democracy, playing out in front of our eyes. And voters will ultimately get to decide this fall whether or not they want to make these temporary changes and level the playing field,” she said.