While attorneys for the Utah Legislature were in court for a second day defending the congressional map backed by lawmakers, a response from prominent Republicans to return the redistricting fight to the status quo changed tack.
GOP party leaders will withdraw their campaign to indirectly repeal Proposition 4 through a Legislative vote. The 2018 citizen-approved redistricting law is at the center of Utah’s current court-ordered congressional map redrawing.
They’re not giving up. Instead, they’ll take a direct approach, which means trying to get enough signatures to put the repeal vote on the ballot before voters.
That’s the same route Prop 4 took in the first place, and the first step on a long road that brought the Legislature, and the plaintiffs — the League of Women Voters of Utah, Mormon Women for Ethical Government and a handful of Utah Voters — to Judge Dianna Gibson’s courtroom.
The GOP’s withdrawal was sent on Friday afternoon during the tail end of the second day of court hearings over the three map options in front of the judge. Attorneys for both sides in the case put their expert witnesses on the stand for questioning. The plaintiffs led the arguments on day one, and on the second day, the Legislature’s hired mapmaker took the stand.
Sean Trende, a senior elections analyst for RealClearPolitics with a Ph.D. in political science from The Ohio State University, drew several map options. Some were derived from computer-simulated maps, while others were hand-drawn.
Trende said he used the state’s 2021 congressional map, which was thrown out by the court, as a jumping-off point for the hand-drawn options. One of which was eventually chosen by lawmakers and called Map C.
“I remember the Legislature was like, ‘We need to get going. We'd like to at least have some ideas.’ And so that's when I thought, well, the best idea that I have is to take this map and fix it and send some different ways of fixing it.”
The manually drawn options were not just the old map “in disguise,” Trende argued, since he moved around almost 40% of the state's population. Given the time constraints, Trende said he started with the old boundaries with an eye toward fixing the structural problems he saw, like the four-way split of Salt Lake County.
When plaintiffs’ attorney Mark Gaber asked Trende, “So the quadrant configuration that the Legislature chose in 2021 was just necessarily built into how you were going to move forward with the hand-drawn maps?”
Trende replied with a bit of a chuckle, “I didn't want to be the map drawer. And so this is how I started with this.”
Another criticism of Trende’s hand-drawn maps, including Map C, was that he used Dave’s Redistricting App, an online tool. During the September hearings, one of the co-chairs of the Legislative Redistricting Committee said he had problems with citizens using the app because it shows partisan data, which wasn’t allowed under the restored Prop 4. Gaber played two audio clips for the court of Utah Sen. Scott Sandall, saying publicly that lawmakers couldn’t use a citizen-submitted map because the individual used Dave’s Redistricting App.
Trende said he was never told by the Legislature's attorneys not to use that application, or to turn off displaying partisan data — which he said is not “terribly helpful.” That’s because it shows a composite election score that includes contests back to 2012.
Trende stood by Map C as fair and said he believed Democrats could win under it.
“So there's two districts in this map that are more Democratic than a district that elected Democrats and had very close races in the previous cycle,” Trende said, referring to the state’s 2011 congressional map.
As when the plaintiff’s experts took the stand the day before, the hearing was technical and dense. Both sides have dueling academic experts with competing methodologies and thousands of computer-simulated maps. And both sides, with their chosen experts, disagree on the best academic tests to judge the fairness of maps.
The partisan bias test was a hot issue both days.
Lawmakers recently codified that test, along with two others, as the only ways to adjudicate congressional maps’ fairness. This is despite some experts saying the partisan bias test is not appropriate in states like Utah, where one party dominates statewide races. It’s referred to as the “Utah Paradox.”
Trende argued that the test had to be used because Prop 4 says to judge maps using the best methods, “including measures of partisan symmetry.” He doesn’t think the partisan symmetry language should have been in there in the first place because it would cause disputes like this one.
But since it is, Trende said he believes the only way to measure symmetry is with the partisan bias test, an idea he said was established in a 2020 academic article. The plaintiff’s attorney pushed back, saying it was impossible for Utahns to consider that 2020 article when they voted on the language two years earlier.
One of the authors of the article, Caltech professor Jonathan Katz, was another of the defense’s witnesses. He spoke generally about the strengths and weaknesses of various tests, but he didn’t wade into what’s happening in Utah or offer an opinion.
The state’s last witness, Brigham Young University political science professor Michael Barber, discussed his own analysis of the Legislature’s Map C and two maps from the plaintiffs.
He criticized the algorithm used by the plaintiff’s lead expert, University of Michigan professor Jowei Chen, and the computer-simulated maps it came up with for Chen’s analysis.
“My criticism is not that it favors Democrats. It is that it has a bias towards creating a district in that part of that state,” Barber said, referring to a district in the northern part of Salt Lake County that showed up in multiple of Chen’s computer-simulated maps and is more likely to yield a Democrat-favoring district.
Both Barber and Chen believe there are flaws in the other’s work. Chen said the plaintiff’s map was neutral and the Legislature’s was partisan. Barber said the exact opposite, saying Map C passed all of his fairness tests while the plaintiff’s maps, including Map 2, which was a reworked version of lawmakers’ Map C, failed some of them.
Both sides will submit their final arguments to Judge Gibson, who will have to wade through everything and decide which side, and their corresponding experts, she finds credible.
By Nov. 10, Gibson has to rule on whether the Legislature’s map complies with the redistricting standards in Prop 4. If it doesn’t, she could decide that one of the plaintiff’s maps will be used.
There are additional complications that add uncertainty.
The plaintiffs are also objecting to the Legislature’s law that codified the map tests. They argue it “guts Prop 4” and are asking for Gibson to block it. Both sides will submit written arguments to the court before a Nov. 4 hearing.
While the tactic for the Republicans’ campaign to repeal Prop 4 has changed, that same group is also running a campaign to repeal Map C, the one lawmakers approved. If Gibson were to rule Map C as the state’s map and it gets repealed, it's unclear what that would mean for Utah’s 2026 election.
