It might have been the biggest political win for Utahns — regular ol’ Utah citizens — in decades.
I’m referring to the Utah Supreme Court’s decision last month to strike down the state Legislature’s repeal of Proposition 4, the citizen initiative that prohibited partisan gerrymandering, as unconstitutional.
The court’s argument was straightforward: Utah’s Constitution says that people “have the right to alter or reform their government as the public welfare may require,” and further establishes the public’s right to citizen initiatives. The Legislature can pass almost all sorts of laws, but it can’t pass laws that infringe upon constitutional rights.
Therefore, “government-reform initiatives are constitutionally protected from unfettered legislative amendment, repeal, or replacement,” the court decided.
The people have regained power. In a unanimous ruling, to boot.
The district court will decide what to do next, but new district maps are likely to be drawn. (Not in time for the 2024 election, however.) Given that, I figured it was a good time to look at what we should prioritize in these maps, as well as some examples of responsible mapmaking in action from members of the community.
The standard of a good map
Last year, when the Utah Supreme Court heard the case, there was a lot of discussion about “judicially manageable standards” for these maps. I figured the court might pick and choose things the Legislature could and couldn’t control. Instead, the court backed up and just used the more simple rationale above, favoring Proposition 4 advocates completely.
So it’s worth reminding ourselves just what the Proposition 4 map standards were:
1. Adhering to federal law and achieving equal population between districts
2. Minimizing divisions of municipalities and counties across multiple districts
3. Making districts geographically compact
4. Making districts that are contiguous and allow for ease of transport throughout the district
5. Preserving traditional neighborhoods and local communities of interest
6. Following natural and geographic boundaries, barriers and features
7. Maximizing the agreement of boundaries between different types of districts
8. Avoiding dividing districts in a manner that “purposefully or unduly favors” a political party or candidate
Remember, the Legislature’s map actually passed muster by the Princeton Gerrymandering Project’s algorithm at first. The map is, to its credit, very compact. It avoids racial inequity extremely well, and in an imaginary 50/50 election in Utah, the Democrats would win one or two seats. The Princeton machine gave it an A letter grade ... before its human directors came in and looked at how the Legislature had achieved it. Eventually, the grade was downgraded to a C.
The algorithm initially didn’t work well because measuring gerrymandering in Utah is very different than measuring gerrymandering in other states. Having just four congressional districts means that the sample size is small, confounding a lot of the basic partisan-bias checks, and Utah’s small number of minorities means it’s not a useful proxy for election outcomes like it can be elsewhere.
A math researcher at Brigham Young University, Annika King, noticed these problems, and wanted to figure out a better way of studying Utah’s maps objectively. In her paper “Mathematical Analysis of Redistricting in Utah,” King found via computer modeling that it was actually impossible to make two contiguous districts in Utah that are likely to result in Democratic congresspeople. There simply aren’t enough Democratic voters.
So when we talk about whether or not a Utah map is fair from a partisan perspective, what we’re really talking about is how likely it is that Utah’s map results in a three-to-one Republican/Democrat split, or a four-to-zero Republican Democrat split. That is determined by a metric that King calls the Least Republican Vote Share — the percentage of votes Republicans are likely to get in the least Republican district.
King sorted through the traditional gerrymandering metrics to see which ones can work to measure partisan changes to the Least Republican Vote Share, and found that most failed. Only one she studied really succeeded: the “ranked-marginal deviation” (RMD), which is a fancy mathy term that basically measures how unusual the distribution of votes in a given plan is compared to all possible plans.
Using a composite of the six major elections from 2012 to 2020, Utah’s least Republican district is District 2, where Celeste Maloy currently holds office. There, Republicans hold 60.1% of the votes in an average election, making it solidly red, and therefore Utah is likely to have four Republican House members. But Utah’s four districts all have between 60% to 67% Republican voters, a highly atypical distribution among all possible plans — raising RMD’s warning alarms that gerrymandering may be afoot.
It’s a metric we should be watching when we consider the next round of maps.
Making better maps
How will that occur?
We still don’t know. The case now goes to the 3rd District Court for ultimate parsing out. Most observers expect the court to require an independent redistricting commission to ultimately decide new maps for the 2026 election cycle following the rules set out in Proposition 4.
It would be reasonable for that group to go back to the work of the original Independent Redistricting Commission and approve one of the three maps it originally presented to the Legislature in 2021. That included one map created by citizen Stuart Hepworth, and two created by the commission.
The three maps presented to the Legislature by the independent redistricting commission in 2021. Left is "SH2", the map created by Utah resident Stuart Hepworth, middle is "Purple" draft v3, and right is "Orange" draft v7.
The three maps all followed good boundary making principles, but prioritized them differently, so you get three very different maps.
As a result of following those principles, all would have created a least-Republican district that was at least slightly Democratic. Hepworth’s plan creates a district that has a Least Republican Vote Share of 42%, the Purple plan has a Least Republican Vote Share of 36%, and the Orange plan has a Least Republican Vote Share of 40%.
However, we have had changes in Utah’s communities over the last four years, as measured by updated U.S. Census estimates. We’ve also had new elections to help us learn about how Utah precincts are likely to vote. That’s catnip to redistricting enthusiasts like those using Dave’s Redistricting, a free web app that allows anyone to create their own map and evaluate it on a variety of metrics. The Utah Supreme Court’s decision also attracted interested folks from around the country with a rare chance to imagine new maps in the middle of a decade.
So here are three of my favorites, serious and not:
Three user-created maps with different approaches to redistricting Utah.
• The map on the left is labeled as “OG’s Revision of Kevin’s Utah V2″ on Dave’s Redistricting. While I don’t know who OG or Kevin are, it’s the map on the site that has Utah’s most compact districts, with the most proportional demographic splits, and splits counties and precincts the least. Its Least Republican Vote Share is 48%.
• User Substantial_Item_828 on Reddit created the “Fair Utah v3″ map, which splits off southwestern Salt Lake County to join Utah County for its own district, while keeping the rest of SLCo intact. That creates a map that has a Least Republican Vote Share of 35%.
• The map on the right, “Utah’s smallest districts,” simply tried to create the three of the smallest districts possible, leaving one humongous district covering most of the empty land in the state. This approach cracked me up — it’s the opposite of the Legislature’s four gigantic districts — but also revealed something pretty fundamental about how close the vast majority of people who live in this state truly are. The user who created this map shared it on Reddit, then deleted his account, which is probably a good sign for how seriously it should be taken. Its Least Republican Vote Share is 38%.
Finally, it’s worth noting: Under current forecasted growth rates, Utah is projected to gain a 5th congressional seat in 2030. Then, it would be possible to create two Democratic districts, and the battle in redistricting talks will be about whether Utah gets one or two Democratic-competitive seats.
No, the Supreme Court’s decision doesn’t remove all debate on the issue. But it does give Utah voters their say — now, six years from now, and for decades to come.
Editor’s note • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.
