When it comes to gerrymandering, Republicans aren’t shy in their attempts to consolidate voting power and rig the electoral process in their favor.
Red states like Texas and Missouri recently completed rare mid-decade redistricting efforts at the explicit behest of President Donald Trump. And a handful of other GOP-led states — including Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Indiana — are considering, or are in the early stages of, redistricting efforts.
But the GOP’s Utah redistricting power-play might be its most egregious yet. Not because the most seats are at stake — while Texas grabbed five new congressional seats for the GOP, only one is at stake in Utah. But because of the lengths it goes to put raw political advantage ahead of respect for the will of voters.
“The power to draw fair maps is so important that people will try to find ways to get out of doing it,” Michael Li, senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, told Democracy Docket. “Utah comes to mind as a particularly brazen example of that.”
Republicans are trying to ensure that they keep all four of the state’s congressional seats, after a court ordered them to draw fair maps. To do so, they’re scheming for a way to avoid having to comply with a voter-approved anti-gerrymandering law, which passed overwhelmingly less than a decade ago.
In 2018, Utah voters approved Proposition 4, a ballot measure to create an independent redistricting commission to draw fair maps. The legislature repealed Prop 4 and drew a gerrymandered congressional map, leading to a prolonged legal battle between the state’s GOP and pro-voting groups. Several courts upheld Prop 4 and struck down the GOP map.
In September, the Utah Supreme Court gave what seemed to be the final word on the matter: The court denied the GOP-controlled legislature’s bid to keep its gerrymandered map in place for upcoming elections, and ordered lawmakers to kick off the redistricting process by presenting a new map by the end of the September — with the goal of submitting a final map that complies with Prop 4 to the court by November.
A bill to skirt the state’s anti-gerrymandering law
The night before the legislature’s redistricting committee met to start its process of selecting a new map, Sen. Brady Brammer (R) introduced a bill that would throw the process into chaos: SB 1011. Within days, lawmakers had rammed through both Brammer’s bill and a new GOP-friendly map, and Gov. Spencer Cox (R) had signed both into law.
Senate Bill 1011 was framed as a check on party favoritism by requiring any map passed by the legislature to pass three “partisan bias” tests. These would replace the judicial review that ensured a map was compliant with Prop 4. But though the tests were made to appear party-neutral, they were reverse-engineered to always give the GOP an advantage beyond its numbers in the state.
In one test, for example, each congressional district would be required to have a partisan vote share roughly in line with statewide election results over the last 12 years, in which the GOP has consistently won by comfortable margins. The result would be to ensure all four districts were comfortably Republican-leaning.
Another test requires comparing a proposed map to an “ensemble” map created via computer simulation, to similarly ensure it corresponded to statewide results. GOP lawmakers would control the process, including the data and metrics used to create the simulation.
“Clearly this is an effort to sort of game the system,” Li said. “It’s not wrong to consider different standards over time and things like that. But this seems to be trying to tie the court’s hand. They’re really trying to undermine what voters wanted, because some of the standards don’t make sense in Utah.”
What’s clear is that Utah Republicans are, once again, trying to sideline the will of the voters and subvert democracy in the Beehive State — just as they did when they first tried to repeal Prop 4 in 2020.
What’s confusing about this new attempt is how they’re doing it.
“I never thought I’d be just heads down in statistical tests during this point in my career,” Elizabeth Rasmussen, the executive director of the anti-gerrymandering advocacy group Better Boundaries, told Democracy Docket.
Because of the Utah Supreme Court’s September ruling to uphold Prop 4 and the block on the GOP’s gerrymandered map, Rasmussen said she was a little shocked but not entirely surprised when Brammer introduced S.B. 1011.
“It was almost like a flashback to the past, because back in 2020, the legislature passed another bill that really subverted Prop 4,” she said. “The whole idea of the legislature trying to find ways around these checks on their power has continued to happen. They’re just a little better at it, because they have to be. Because they keep getting additional checks.”
Tying the court’s hands
On the surface, the “partisan bias” tests outlined in S.B. 1011 are a good thing.
When applied the right way, and administered by a governing body with no ulterior motive — like a court — these tests are a hypereffective way to determine if a map is a gerrymander, according to Li.
But, as Li explained, there’s not a single test that works to determine a gerrymander — it’s how all of them work together. He likens it to seeking medical attention with an undetermined illness. The doctor runs a bunch of tests to figure out the diagnosis, he said.
Buried in S.B. 1011 is a provision that says “any judicial review” of the legislature’s redistricting plan to see if it complies with Prop 4 will be based on the outcomes of the three “partisan bias” tests — the ones rigged to disproportionately favor GOP dominance. It’s a sly attempt to completely gut the soul of Prop 4: to prevent gerrymandering.
“It’s not a problem that they propose these tests, it’s a problem that they’ve tried to tie the court’s hands with these tests,” Li said. “That’s the issue.”
The pro-voting groups who’ve been fighting the GOP’s attempts to repeal Prop 4 objected to the map that the legislature passed earlier this month, alleging that it “purposefully and unduly favors Republicans and disfavors Democrats in violation of Proposition 4’s prohibition on partisan favoritism.”
In their latest legal filing, the groups — the League of Women Voters of Utah and the Mormon Women for Ethical Government — challenged the constitutionality of S.B. 1011, and submitted two Prop 4-compliant maps for the court to consider in place of the legislature’s map.
“We’re pretty optimistic about where things are headed,” Rasmussen said. “We are coming off of — this is now four significant court wins. That being said, we’re still seeing the legislature try to find ways to subvert this law and this process that voters put in place.”
As if the drama over the redistricting battle in the legislature weren’t enough, earlier this week the Utah Republican Party jumped into the fray, filing paperwork to gather more than 140,000 signatures to repeal the legislature’s map — which the party endorsed two weeks earlier — along with Prop 4. The pro-voting groups amended their ongoing lawsuit to block this latest effort by the GOP to repeal Prop 4.
State Republican Party Chair Rob Axson told the local ABC affiliate that, while the party wants an even more GOP-friendly map, they also want to put the redistricting process back into the hands of the state’s Republican-controlled legislature, rather than in the hands of voters.
Rasmussen said that the state GOP’s referendum effort is yet another attempt to overturn the will of Utahns.
“These are desperate, transparent attempts to run out the clock, obstruct court-ordered reforms, and confuse the public ahead of 2026,” she said in a statement. “They do nothing to serve Utahns — only to protect gerrymandered power.”