Everyone needs a hobby. In the same way some use their spare time for art or to build furniture, 26-year-old Stuart Hepworth draws congressional district maps.
Armed with demographic statistics, he submitted 10 to the Legislative Redistricting Committee in Utah’s ongoing court-ordered redrawing.
“It's just fun,” he said. “It's satisfying to get districts that go together in just the right way.”
If you close your eyes and picture what a local amateur congressional map drawer might look like, Hepworth is your guy. His hair is a little unkept, and his glasses barely contain his excited eyes.
“The most important thing is population equality and following federal law, and the legal standard for population equality for professional districts is just 0.1% deviation between districts on a map, and if you're in that 0.1% range, then you're basically good to go,” he said.
Sixty-three maps have been submitted to the committee so far. Of those, 54 were from the public, one was done by Forward Party Sen. Daniel Thatcher and the final six were drawn by independent analysts hired by the committee — five for the Republicans and a single map for Democrats.
Those final six lawmaker maps are up for a vote from the committee and then the full Legislature in an Oct. 6 special session. That’s the deadline agreed to by lawmakers, the state groups who sued over Utah’s maps and the court. The GOP hired Sean Trende, a senior analyst for RealClearPolitics, for their maps. The Democratic map was drawn by Daniel Magleby, a professor at SUNY Binghamton, New York.
The other maps drawn and submitted by the public won’t be voted on. Republican Sen. Scott Sandall, chair of the redistricting committee, told reporters that lawmakers would not consider any of them.
Despite having drawn and submitted 10 maps, Stuart Hepworth was relieved by that. He said that’s because several maps from the public were drawn using partisan voting data, including some of his own. To him, public maps offered a loophole.
“My big concern going into last week was that at the last minute, the Legislature would substitute out one of the five maps that Sean Trende drew, [and] pull a gerrymander drawn by a member of the public. … It would be easy for the Legislature to sneak in one of those maps that hadn't gotten any real scrutiny,” Hepworth concluded.
Committee wrangling
Hepworth isn’t alone in his skepticism of the committee’s bipartisan handling of the map-drawing process.
The five Republican-commissioned maps faced criticism from Democrats and the public for favoring the GOP and not following Proposition 4, the 2018 voter-approved initiative to promote transparency and impartiality in the redistricting process.
The Legislature’s move to diminish the independent redistricting committee established by Proposition 4 and then draw its own maps in 2021 is what led Third District Court Judge Dianna Gibson to rule the maps unconstitutional after claims that the initiative changes opened the door to gerrymandering.
Of the 10 lawmakers working to draw new maps, only two are Democrats: Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla and Rep. Doug Owens.
“The five maps drawn by the majority's expert, Sean Trende, we thought those maps punished Democrats,” Owens said.
Across the aisle on the Republican side of the redistricting committee is Co-Chair Rep. Candice Pierucci, who disagreed with Owens.
“People keep crying about, well, you didn't get the outcome we wanted. Proposition 4 is a process,” she said in an interview with KUER.
As they follow Proposition 4, Pierucci characterizes the process as one that doesn’t guarantee a Democratic seat. She bases her argument on voter registrations. As of Sept. 29, according to state data, there are 238,498 Democrats out of 1,748,089 active registered voters. That’s nearly 14% of voters. Republicans make up almost 53%.
“Proposition 4 did not guarantee Democrats get a seat in Utah, and if you were to look at party affiliation … in my opinion, you have to gerrymander pretty hard in the other direction to give Democrats a seat,” Pierucci said.
The argument that led to the court challenge was that the original maps split Salt Lake County, the state’s Democratic stronghold, into each of the four congressional districts. Owens rejects the voter registration argument because it doesn’t truly reflect the number of the state’s blue voters.
“If you look at the numbers that Democrats routinely attract in statewide races, it's well north, it's close to 40%,” he said.
Since Utah is a supermajority state, voters from other parties have long registered as Republicans to participate in primaries and act as a moderating force. That’s changing now as Brian King, the head of the Utah Democratic Party, is asking voters to come back to the party. They don’t see the strategy working, something that the GOP would agree with.
From the beginning, Owens said the Republican members on the committee made it difficult for the minority caucus to give input.
“Sen. Escamilla and I spent three days drawing maps, and they kept failing Dr. Trende’s test of partisan symmetry,” he said.
They had asked Trende to draw their map, but he refused, Owens said, something he found “interesting.”
Teamwork between the majority and minority caucuses is a staple of Utah politics, Pierucci said.
“A lot of bills we do reach across the aisle, over 85% of our bills have bipartisan support during the legislative session,” she said.
Although this time, there was no appetite from either side for the “Utah Way.”
“It has become very clear that even before the committee, the Democrats were posting on social media about the court case and talking about the majority caucus in a negative way.”
GOP groundswell behind Map C
Earlier in the week, the Utah Republican Party emailed its members to urge them to post public comments in support of “Map C” on the redistricting committee’s official website.
The email said, but does not specify, that outside groups are seizing an opportunity for a “blue takeover.” The email claimed that Map C has the legislative boundaries to “stop the Democrats.”
This drew criticism from Chairman King. He posted a screenshot of the email on X and called it the “most rigged and least competitive” map.
"For weeks, Republican members of the redistricting committee have lectured Utahns about avoiding partisan commentary and keeping politics out of the process," King later said in a statement. “Meanwhile, their own party is flooding inboxes with instructions on which map to support — because it’s the least competitive — and how to defend it. The hypocrisy is stunning."
When asked if she knew about the email promoting Map C before the upcoming Oct. 6 vote, Rep. Pierucci denied reading it and said it did not come from lawmakers on the redistricting committee. She also noted they have no control over what the public says about the maps.
“If you go back and listen to the committee meetings, our committee members, several of them, spoke in favor of Map C way before this email came out,” she said.
