My statement on today’s Utah Supreme Court’s decision about gerrymandering
On Thursday morning, July 11, 2024, the Utah Supreme Court upheld a lawsuit challenging the Utah legislature’s redistricting boundaries.
My statement
Congratulations and many thanks to the League of Women Voters of Utah, Mormon Women for Ethical Government, and the others who are in this suit. We are lucky and blessed to have the same government spirit among us that made Utah and Wyoming the first territories to allow women to vote.
I encourage all voters to put strengthening democracy and our constitutions as our number one voting issue.
I encourage voters to also put personal integrity very high in their voting issues priority list.
I also echo the statement from Better Boundaries Utah on today’s ruling (emphasis added by me):
Today marks a significant victory for representative democracy in Utah. The people of Utah voted in 2018 for more transparency and accountability from our state government and today the Utah Supreme Court affirmed it. We look forward to the day when Utah voters can finally pick their own politicians, not the other way around.
There are some people who want to take more and more power away from the people and give more and more power to politicians and their lobbyists. There are some people who would like political elections that are impossible to lose or even would like a dictator because they’re certain they’d be in the inner circle.
This little battle about district boundaries and gerrymandering in Utah is one of many little battles for democracy and the constitution that are playing out in states across the country.
It was the number one priority of the Founding Fathers to enshrine checks and balances and the rule of law to constrain the government and make it listen to the people.
Extreme power and money corrupt almost all leaders.
We need strong laws, fair elections, independently fair districts, and multiple parties. We need checks and balances.
Though not directly on the ballot this year, I encourage you to support term limits, age limits, ranked choice voting and other ballot systems, and campaign finance reforms in the future.
What happened
In the next two sections, I describe what the lawsuit is about and a summary of the gerrymandering situation, and I discuss the implications of the gerrymandering fight for Utah.
The topic of the lawsuit is this: in 2018, Utahns voted on a ballot initiative to reform the government. Utahns’ reform passed with a state-wide vote, and it included giving power to independent commissions to draw fair district maps.
The reform wouldn’t really have much effect until 2020 with the next U.S. Census, because it is every 10 years at census time that maps are redrawn.
For the 2020 census cycle, the Republican super-majority in the Utah legislature decided to amend the 2018 ballot initiative, overruling the will of the people, by making the commissions’ decisions non-binding and changing their role to be an “advisory role.”
This effectively impaired the people-approved government reform — it no longer reformed anything and actually became a source of additional financial waste, as independent commissions would research and draw maps that were promptly discarded by the legislature.
Why this is important
The Utah Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the lawsuit is a legal win for the League of Women Voters of Utah, for Mormon Women for Ethical Government, and for others who sued. The goal of their lawsuit is to eventually get the people’s reform back in effect.
This is impactful because Utah usually has a strong mix of representation in Congress, as you can see by the multi-party delegation sent every year almost continuously until the first heavily-gerrymandered district map went into effect in 2013.
That gerrymandered map from the 2010 Census splits Salt Lake City into perfectly measured slices, and the boundaries spiral out into rural areas in order to dilute the voice of Salt Lake County.
Not only does this block Utah’s tradition of mixed representation in Congress, but it silences as far as possible the voice of the people in Utah’s largest city and its capitol, as well as in other areas.
With the 2020 Census, the Republican super-majority had a chance to make their gerrymandering from the 2013 map even stronger. Unfortunately for them, the People had just voted that district lines would be drawn by an independent commission and would be fair based off such bases as population data, computer models, and expert counsel.
The Republicans, however, changed the people’s ballot initiative without their consent, disregarded the commission’s map, and drew the new map (the second image below). It went into effect in 2023 and it gets the gerrymandering just right to continue silencing a large group of people and kneecapping democracy.
The ballot initiative also provides independent commissions for local districts and other elections, and the change to the ballot initiative makes those non-binding, too.
As such, this ballot initiative has a massive impact on how government works all across Utah and even at the national level in Congress. Without independently drawn districts, the People also lose their ability to hold their representatives accountable for pulling stunts like this — if you don’t like this gerrymandering, you can’t vote them out to change it back anyway, because that’s the definition of gerrymandering. The joke is that in a well-gerrymandered place, the politicians are choosing their voters, not the other way around.
This November, get out there and vote! Remember, voting is easy and makes a very big difference! You don’t have to be the one caring about or filing every lawsuit, some people do that for their job. But voting is very easy and makes a difference. (Did you know, 2020 is the first presidential election where “Did not vote” was not the winner?)
Now for all the maps:
