Utah’s congressional elections in 2026 will be the first in more than a decade held with maps that lack a strong partisan bias. They are the result of a grassroots reform movement that championed a ballot measure in 2018 to give the power of drawing districts to an impartial commission and eliminate partisan gerrymandering. When the legislature moved to curtail or even undermine the work of this commission, Utahns challenged the effort and have now won a significant victory for fair maps. Here I detail some of the twists and turns in the process and compare how various district proposals drawn by the state and by supporters of fair redistricting adhere to the state’s new redistricting standards to show how the 2026 map outperforms any other proposal.
The Legislature Moves to Subvert Reform
Utah was one of five states to pass a redistricting reform ballot measure in 2018. Proposition 4 created a commission whose seven members, appointed by the governor and legislative leadership, would draw congressional district plans and then present those proposals to the legislature for an up-or-down vote.
Proposition 4 also established standards to guide redistricting, including equal population across districts, adherence to the Voting Rights Act, minimal division of municipalities and counties, compactness, contiguity, and respect for local communities of interest and geographic features. It bars the commission and the legislature from drawing any district that “purposefully or unduly favors or disfavors any incumbent elected official, candidate or prospective candidate for elective office, or any political party.” Further, the commission and the legislature can now draw upon established judicial standards and “the best available data and scientific and statistical methods” to test whether a given plan is biased. Taken as a whole, the reforms passed in Proposition 4 substantially improve how districts are drawn in the state by mandating a transparent process that includes input from the public, adopting objective standards to hold district proposals up against, and introducing neutral decision-making to a process long dominated by politicians.
Despite a majority of voters supporting the reform, the legislature sought to dilute the effect of Proposition 4 after it was passed. In March 2020 the legislature passed SB200, which designated maps drawn by the commission as purely advisory — that is, just for the legislature’s consideration. SB200 also freed the legislature from any limits on drawing biased maps while continuing to impose that constraint on the commission’s work. Then, in November 2021, the legislature passed HB2004, establishing congressional districts for the 2022 elections. Shortly after the plan’s passage, the League of Women Voters (LWV) of Utah, Mormon Women for Ethical Government, and individual voters, collectively represented by the Campaign Legal Center, filed a challenge to both legislative actions.
The crux of their challenge was that SB200 and the subsequent legislature-drawn maps violated the constitutional provision that “all power is inherent in the people; and all free governments are founded on their authority for their equal protection and benefit, and they have the right to alter or reform their government as the public welfare may require.” In short, the legislature impermissibly spoke in place of the people when the people had spoken for themselves in Proposition 4.
In July 2024, the Utah Supreme Court recognized the right of the people of the state to enact laws through the initiative process and ruled that the legislature cannot override actions taken by the people. The court also invalidated a proposed Amendment D on the 2024 ballot, which would have explicitly permitted the legislature to amend, enact, or repeal any measure adopted by the people of the state. After further review on the merits, a state district court invalidated both SB200 and HB2004 in August 2025. It affirmed that “Proposition 4 is the law on redistricting in Utah” as it ordered a remedial districting process to create a plan to be used in the upcoming 2026 elections. The court invited the legislature and the plaintiffs to propose maps that the court could adopt for those elections.
Assessing District Proposals
Now I turn to an array of statewide district plans and show how they compare with regard to two of the key standards contained in Proposition 4: the county and city preservation criteria and the prohibition on partisan gerrymandering. My intent is to demonstrate that these plans all minimize population deviations but vary in their compliance with the other standards in Proposition 4.
I determined whether plans meet the rebuttable presumption of being a partisan gerrymander using the test included in the Freedom to Vote Act as introduced in Congress in 2021. To do so, I used precinct-level election results for presidential and Senate races between 2016 and 2020 to measure how closely the partisan division in a given plan’s districts matches a neutral election based only on the share of the statewide vote for the two major parties.
Failing the test would require the state to explain, or rebut, the claim that the enacted map is a partisan gerrymander to a federal judge; otherwise, the map could not be used in an election. While the Freedom to Vote Act is not law and the state used a different standard for judging the partisan fairness of the plans, the test provides a consistent way to compare congressional districts across the country. The Freedom to Vote Act offers one way to prevent partisan gerrymandering since the Supreme Court ruled in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) that such claims are not reviewable by federal courts.
I compared nine different proposals: the three originally drawn by the commission for the 2022 elections (titled Public, Purple, and Orange); three plans adopted by the legislature (the districts first used in the 2012 election; the plan used in the 2022 and 2024 elections; and the Option C plan, passed by the legislature and submitted to the court to consider for the 2026 elections during the remedial districting process managed by the court); and the two plans proposed by the Utah League of Women Voters for the court’s consideration during the remedial phase: its Proposal 1 and a “least changes” plan, which prioritizes keeping cities and counties together and avoiding partisan advantage.
The ninth proposal is my own illustrative draft, created as an exercise in exploring the Utah’s demography with current statistical methods. I started by simulating 5,000 plans with contiguous districts whose populations deviate no more than 0.25 percent from the ideal (about 2,000 people) using a districting algorithm I designed with academic colleagues. From that set of 5,000 plans, I eliminated 185 that exhibited partisan gerrymandering (or about 4 percent of the simulated results) using the Freedom to Vote Act test to identify a presumption of partisan gerrymandering. Then I focused on the maps that split Salt Lake County into two districts, because it is the only county in the state whose population is larger than the ideal congressional district population and therefore must be split into multiple districts. (The ideal population size was 817,904 people in 2020; the 2012 plan was drawn on the basis of 2010 census data and required 690,971 people in each district, which resulted in Salt Lake City being split four ways.) I then reduced the county and city divisions in Solution 485 as much as I could to comply with Proposition 4’s county and city preservation criteria. Finally, I reran the Freedom to Vote Act test to see if Solution 485 remained unbiased.
The table below reports whether each of these congressional district plans would pass or fail the Freedom to Vote Act test and the number of counties and cities that are divided into multiple congressional districts.
Only the maps passed by the legislature would fail the Freedom to Vote Act test for partisan gerrymandering. The court found that Option C, its proposal for 2026, “is an extreme partisan outlier — more Republican than over 99% of expected maps drawn without political considerations.” My own set of simulated plans also places Option C at the far tail of the distribution of possible plans.
Any of the commission’s proposals would have satisfied the standard in Proposition 4 to neither favor nor disfavor any incumbent, candidate, or party. Both LWV plans submitted for the district court’s consideration and my Solution 485 plan also pass the Freedom to Vote Act test. The LWV least-changes plan takes the legislature’s Option C plan and removes its partisan bias.
We get a more nuanced view of these plans when we look at the frequency of split counties. It is not surprising that each plan divides Salt Lake County, given that its population is larger than that of the ideal district and splitting the county into more than two districts does not on its own demonstrate partisan bias. The county is split into more than two districts in four of the plans I examine here, but only two of those four plans exhibit partisan bias. The three legislative plans are not extreme outliers when it comes to split counties. The commission’s Purple proposal has the most county splits of the group.
There is a wide range of split cities in these plans. Two of the legislature’s plans have the most splits; curiously, the legislature’s 2022 plan was drawn after the Proposition 4 standards were known, yet it still splits many more cities than any of the commission’s proposals. The two LWV proposals manage to split only one city each.
The split cities in these plans tend to cluster around Salt Lake City, not surprising given that about two-thirds of the state lives in Salt Lake County and adjacent Utah and Davis Counties. While there is a close resemblance between the legislature’s 2012 and 2022 plans, Option C markedly reduces the number of split cities, as legislators observed. If we think of redistricting as an iterative process in which the first plan is the basis for future plans, the reduction in split cities in Option C is an example of the legislature refining its ability to keep cities together while also observing other proposals. The LWV had the advantage of seeing all the other proposals before finishing its plans.
That the district court ultimately selected the LWV proposal for the 2026 elections should not be surprising in light of how it compares with other potential plans. This map meets the standard to avoid partisan bias and clearly minimizes the number of split cities in the state. While the LWV least-changes map performed similarly, the district court observed that “there is no escaping the fact that [it] started off as Map C” — that is, that the court felt the map started from a flawed origin.
Challenges Ahead
If only that were the end of the saga. The legislature has since spelled out a new multipronged strategy to weaken the protections against partisan gerrymandering in Proposition 4, including an appeal to the state supreme court in advance of the 2026 election, a special session of the legislature to revisit the congressional district plan, and a constitutional amendment to revive the intent behind Amendment D, which the state supreme court rejected in 2024 on technical grounds. In its special session in early December, the legislature passed a joint resolution condemning Proposition 4 and reasserting the legislature’s primacy in drawing political districts. An effort to force a statewide vote on Proposition 4 in 2026 has so far reportedly gathered about 20 percent of the total number of signatures needed to appear on the ballot.
As we have seen in other states, the progress toward fair maps in Utah has been marked by setbacks of all kinds. What distinguishes Utah, however, is the unambiguous right of the people to speak and enact laws as they see fit. The legislature should listen to the people when they voice their opposition to partisan gerrymandering.
