It is remarkable that, in Utah, the branch of government that is in theory the least democratic should so often be the one most likely to defend democracy.
The Utah Supreme Court, in recent weeks, has slowed legislative attempts to deny the state’s women control of their own health care decisions, restored to women who claim they were abused by a physician the right to sue for damages, shooed away frivolous election-fraud claims from a failed political candidate with a vivid imagination, and defended the right of the people to write their own laws through the initiative process.
And Thursday, as the ballot-printing clock counted down, Utah Third District Judge Dianna Gibson properly ruled that Amendment D — D for deceitful — is not properly before the state’s electorate and that votes for and against shall not be counted.
But the people of Utah can’t always count on the courts to protect them from the power-grabbing tendencies of legislative leaders and their servile governor. From time to time the voters are going to have to stand up and do for themselves the work that their elected officials just won’t.
Gibson’s ruling is likely to be appealed to the Utah Supreme Court, and the validity of Amendment D may be in limbo up to and through Election Day.
So, no matter what the courts do, this November defending democracy in Utah means it is on the voters to rise up and vote down Amendment D.
Amendment D would amend the Utah Constitution to once and for all disembowel the ability of voters to, in extraordinary circumstances, pass their own laws.
The fact that the language on the ballot is so deliberately inaccurate — claiming that the amendment would “strengthen the initiative process” when it would in fact destroy it — led Amendment D opponents to file suit to block what would be a sham election.
Thursday, just as the deadline for printing ballots to be mailed to service members and other overseas Utah voters loomed, Judge Gibson agreed that the language on the ballot was so misleading as to deny Utahns their “meaningful right to vote.”
Printed on the ballot or not, unless the state Supreme Court rules otherwise, Amendment D is void.
As long as Utah has been a state, its Constitution has promised that “all political power is inherent in the people.” For the last 128 years, the law has included a process by which those people may exercise that power through the initiative process. That’s a way of getting enough signatures on petitions to put before the whole electorate an idea that enough of us think should become a state law.
It’s not easy. The number of signatures that must be collected, within a limited time, distributed through most of the state, is a high hurdle. In all that time, only 23 initiative measures have made it onto the ballot and only seven have passed.
Three of those were adopted in 2018. One of them, known as the Better Boundaries initiative, commanded the state to use a nonpartisan process to draw districts for the state legislative and congressional districts. The hope was to end the habit of Republicans to create districts where they couldn’t lose, deliberately disenfranchising the traditionally more moderate and sensible voters of Salt Lake County by cracking it into four congressional districts.
But the Legislature took the guts out of that initiative by passing its own law, one that made the independent redistricting commission advisory and allowing lawmakers to ignore it. Which, of course, they did.
A lawsuit in defense of the Better Boundaries led the Utah Supreme Court to unanimously rule that, in matters concerning the design and form of government, the Legislature cannot just sweep aside the expressed will of the voters. They left to the lower courts the question of whether drawing voting districts is such a matter.
But the Legislature, seeking to end the suspense, rammed Amendment D through the process and also took advantage of a recent law that allowed lawmakers, rather than their nonpartisan legal staff, to decide how the amendment would be described on the ballot.
Beyond the deceptive language voters will find on the ballot, legislative leaders are claiming that a real initiative process will leave the state vulnerable to waves of foreign influence and stacks of ballot measures akin to what they describe as a California-like mess.
But the only “foreign influence” found in Utah politics has been the hospitality of the Middle Eastern monarchy of Qatar to curry the favor of Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes and Senate President Stuart Adams. And there is little threat that Utah’s initiative obstacle course will ever lead to a Golden State-level blizzard of initiatives.
Utah voters are fortunate to have a judiciary that, more often than the political branches, watches out for democracy in our state. But, for democracy to truly survive, we have to be ready to do our own bit at the polls.
Vote no on Amendment D. Just in case.