In her ruling Monday, 3rd District Judge Dianna Gibson sided with the plaintiffs in a lawsuit to decide what congressional boundaries will govern Utah’s 2026 elections.
The decision blocks the Republican-controlled Legislature’s map from being used.
Ben Phillips is a Campaign Legal Center attorney — a plaintiff in the case. He says the Legislature’s map was rejected because it doesn’t follow Proposition 4, the 2018 voter-approved initiative that sought to prohibit gerrymandering.
Under Prop 4, congressional maps can’t be drawn using partisan data. But Phillips said many maps proposed by community members earlier in the lawsuit relied on a software program called Daves Redistricting that did just that.
He says those maps were rejected by lawmakers for their bias. Later, however, they hired a consultant who told the court he relied on the same program to craft the Legislature’s preferred map.
“He admitted that he had partisan data on the screen while he drew the legislature's map, and that as he clicked individual precincts to move them in or out of the map, he could see the partisan data,” he said on KPCW’s “Local News Hour” Friday. “That alone violates Prop 4.”
The Legislature’s map also violated Prop 4’s rule prohibiting partisan gerrymandering, where a map unduly favors one political party. Phillips said this is measured through a computer simulation programmed to follow the Prop 4 criteria of keeping municipalities and counties whole and following the natural landscape of rivers and mountains.
“When you compared the legislature's map to those 10,000 neutrally drawn maps, the legislature's map was more partisan than over 99.9% of the neutrally drawn computer-generated maps,” he said.
The plaintiffs’ map chosen by Gibson, however, does meet Prop 4 criteria. And Phillips says it’s likely a Utah Democrat will be elected to Congress for the first time in over seven years under the map.
“[The map] splits only one municipality and only three counties, which is the minimum necessary to split for equal population, and it keeps communities together,” Phillips said.
District one of the new map is most of Salt Lake County and keeps the municipalities of the county together. District two covers Utah’s northern five counties while district three is the eastern and southern part of the state. District four is the west side of the Beehive State.
The Legislature has indicated it will appeal the ruling.
The Utah News Dispatch reports a GOP lawmaker also announced he will launch an effort to impeach Gibson for “gross abuse of power, violating the separation of powers and failing to uphold her oath of office to the Utah Constitution.”
But Phillips said it’s common for judges to ensure a valid map is in place.
“The U.S. Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision written by Justice Scalia, said that in situations like this, it's not only appropriate, but specifically encouraged for state courts to ensure that there's a valid map in place.”
Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson has said she intends to follow the court’s order and has begun the process to begin implementing the new map.
