As a blizzard descended on Salt Lake City on Wednesday, a federal three-judge panel spent hours grilling attorneys on opposing sides of a new redistricting lawsuit seeking to throw out a state judge’s earlier decisions that voided Utah’s 2021 congressional map and ordered a remedial map that created one Democratic and three Republican districts.
After three hours of arguments and questioning, the judges did not issue a decision from the courtroom at the Orrin G. Hatch U.S. District Courthouse but took the case under advisement.
What they ultimately decide will have major implications for Utah’s 2026 congressional elections.
Will the court-ordered map imposed by 3rd District Judge Dianna Gibson stand? Or will they reinstate Utah’s 2021 congressional boundaries? Gibson previously ruled the 2021 map was the result of an unconstitutional process after the Utah Legislature drew it in the wake of undoing a 2018 voter-approved anti-gerrymandering law known as Proposition 4 that she’s since reinstated as Utah law.
Attorneys for Utah’s top election administrator, Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, said her office needs an answer on which congressional map will govern the 2026 elections by Monday in preparation for candidate filing deadlines that the Utah Legislature have already pushed until mid-March.
Two members of Utah’s current all-Republican congressional delegation — Reps. Celeste Maloy and Burgess Owens — along with nearly a dozen local leaders and sheriffs filed the lawsuit earlier this month against Henderson.
They’re asking the federal panel to declare the state’s court-ordered map as “unconstitutionally imposed and agreed to by state actors — specifically a state district judge and the Lieutenant Governor — with no authority” under federal or state law. They argued Utah’s courts have no authority to impose a map “other than one adopted by the Legislature.”
But the plaintiffs in a separate yearslong redistricting lawsuit at the state level (which led to the court-ordered map Maloy and Owens are now contesting) argued that the U.S. District Court should dismiss the case because federal law not only allowed — but required — Gibson to impose a court-ordered map after the Legislature failed to enact a lawful one.
The plaintiffs in that previous state case include pro-democracy groups including League of Women Voters of Utah and Mormon Women for Ethical Government. The three-judge panel granted their request to intervene in the federal case.
Henderson’s attorney said her office did not have a position on the merits of the case, but rather urged the judges to make a swift decision so Utah voters and candidates would have certainty about what their political boundaries will be for the 2026 elections.
Read the full report at UtahNewsDispatch.com.
