- The petition to repeal Proposition 4 ended up with nearly 166,000 verified signatures.
- Of the 26 qualified districts, several in Salt Lake County have a margin of less than 700.
- There are still around 1,000 signature removal requests to count in Salt Lake County.
The law at the center of Utah’s redistricting chaos is on track to appear on the November ballot so voters can decide who should have the final say over electoral boundaries: lawmakers or the courts.
After eight years of fierce dispute, Proposition 4, which established a redistricting commission and requirements for drawing voting districts, has upended party primary politics ahead of the midterm elections.
“It looks like we’ll have a ballot initiative now, barring any changes, and that’s going to be another divisive campaign as we head into November of this year,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox told the Deseret News on Friday.
To qualify for the ballot, Utahns for Representative Government, the Republican group behind the initiative to repeal Prop 4, must gather 8% of voter signatures statewide and in 26 of 29 state Senate districts.
On Feb. 15, the group submitted the last of its roughly 225,000 voter signatures. A signature rejection rate of about 25% yielded around 170,000 valid signatures — well beyond the 141,000-signature requirement.
The total number of verified signatures peaked on Monday after clerks finished counting over the weekend. The petition beat the threshold in exactly 26 districts by a margin ranging from 578 signatures to 2,446.
“There’s a very strong desire for Utahns to have the chance to decide what we’re going to do moving forward and to be the final decision-makers on the question of Prop 4,” Utah GOP chair Rob Axson told the Deseret News.
Campaign to upend Prop 4 repeal
But a coordinated signature-removal campaign from the original Prop 4 sponsor, Better Boundaries, has prevented any early celebrations from the GOP, and has instead prompted a lawsuit and last-minute legislation.
In early February, Better Boundaries launched an effort to disrupt the Prop 4 repeal, mailing thousands of voters who had signed the petition a stamped envelope and a partially filled-out form asking county clerks to remove their name.
Later that month, Utahns for Representative Government sued to prevent these signature removal requests from being tallied, alleging that they violated state statute that prohibits paying someone to remove their signature.
Then, late on the last night of the 2026 legislative session, Utah lawmakers adopted a substitute version of HB242, clarifying that Utah’s prohibition on paid incentives to remove a signature applies to pre-paid postage.
Lawmakers and Axson said the Legislature was simply clarifying the preexisting law for courts and campaigns. But Better Boundaries director Elizabeth Rasmussen said they saw the move as direct interference in their effort.
“The Legislature has, once again, changed the rules for their own benefit, with very little public input,” Rasmussen said. “Based on the timeline and based on what happened, it seems like it was planned from the start.”
Signature removal requests with pre-paid postage received by county clerks after Saturday will not be counted under the new law. But “several thousand” Better Boundaries removal requests have already been processed, Rasmussen said.
Could removals halt the petition?
On Tuesday, the grand total of 165,893 verified signatures fell by nearly 100 as new signature removal requests were verified. Even small changes like this could disqualify the initiative if they are in the right districts.
There are four districts with a margin of around 700 signatures or less. All are located in Salt Lake County where there are roughly 1,000 unprocessed removal requests, according to county clerk Lannie Chapman.
“We really do feel good about the pathway to removal,” Rasmussen said. “There are a number of districts that we’re looking at right now, and we believe there are pathways in a number of districts. So we’re continuing to do outreach.”
The final names added to the petition list have until April 23 to request that their name be withdrawn. Around 60,000 signatures have already passed the 45-day removal deadline, Utahns for Representative Government said.
The Lieutenant Governor’s Office instructed county clerks on Sunday to reject removal requests that arrive with pre-paid postage stamps. Better Boundaries said it will do all it can to convince signees to remove their names legally.
A hearing scheduled for Friday to discuss the terms of the legal battle over Better Boundaries’ removal request letters may not happen now that the new law was passed, according to Utahns for Representative Government.
The group said it will wait until the signature withdrawal window has completely passed, and Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson has certified the results, before declaring victory for the petition to put Prop 4 back on the ballot.
What’s next for the Prop 4 repeal?
If the repeal petition is successful, it would throw the state into yet another round of local outreach and national special interests looking to shape how Utah draws its congressional districts and determines voter representation.
The GOP’s petition to repeal Prop 4 entirely has already caught the attention of President Donald Trump and turnout operations like Turning Point Action, which has promised to stay in Utah if Prop 4 gets on the ballot.
“Ultimately, it is a Utah question that is being asked,” Axson said. “We need to have these conversations with our friends and our family and and wrestle with and decide for ourselves how we want to go about voting on this.”
Leading up to the 2018 election, Better Boundaries argued that voters needed to place a check on lawmakers to make sure they did not try to protect incumbents and Republican candidates with their district maps.
The initiative called for an appointed commission to recommend maps to the Legislature every decade according to redistricting criteria to keep municipalities together and avoid purposefully disadvantaging one political party.
The initiative would have forced lawmakers to take a vote on the final recommendation and, while the Legislature had the final say over which map it could choose, it would become liable if interested parties felt it did not comply with Prop 4.
The initiative passed by less than 1% — with a majority only in Salt Lake, Summit, Grand and Carbon counties — in a year when many voters were driven to the polls for initiatives on medical marijuana and Medicaid expansion.
In 2020, lawmakers amended Prop 4 to make the commission’s recommendations and requirements non-binding. When they chose a map splitting Salt Lake County four ways in 2021, Prop 4 supporters turned to the courts.
Following a landmark Utah Supreme Court ruling that made ballot initiatives immune to most changes, a district judge rejected Utah’s map and replaced it with one submitted by advocacy groups, creating a new Democratic district.