It looks like the attempted repeal of Proposition 4, Utah’s ban on gerrymandering, won’t be on November’s ballot.
Despite months of campaigning, millions of dollars and national support — including from President Donald Trump — enough Utahns have removed their signature from the initiative that the question no longer meets state requirements to appear on the ballot.
The fatal blow was in Salt Lake County’s Senate District 15, currently held by Democratic Sen. Kathleen Riebe.
To put the repeal on the ballot, Republican-backed Utahns for Representative Government needed to collect 140,748 signatures. And those signatures needed to come from 8% of voters in at least 26 of the state’s 29 Senate Districts.
When county clerks verified the group's signatures in early March, they met both of those targets. But they had no room for error since they met the threshold in exactly 26 districts.
As of March 26, the group is short 259 signatures of the requirement in Senate District 15, according to a list updated daily by the Lieutenant Governor’s Office. From its peak, the group has lost more than 900 signatures in that district alone. Thousands of signatures have been removed across all the districts.
While the group is above the total signature requirement with 162,974 signers, the effort still fails because they’ve only met the target in 25 Senate Districts. It was expected that geographic targets could be the effort’s Achilles’ heel due to the thin district leads.
Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson still needs to announce an official determination on whether the initiative has failed.
In a statement, Utah GOP Chair Rob Axson, who led the signature effort, thanked the Utahns who signed.
“Whether now or in the future, by litigation or initiative, we will repeal Prop 4,” Axson said. “This fight is not over but just beginning.”
The Republican group wanted to repeal the 2018 citizen-approved ballot initiative that banned gerrymandering and added other redistricting requirements, such as an independent redistricting commission. It was the latest maneuver after a Utah judge reinstated Proposition 4 and ordered a new congressional map that complied with it.
While the previous lawmaker-approved map had four safe GOP seats, the new court-ordered boundaries have one district that favors Democrats. Some lawmakers and Republicans were furious.
The ruling in the multi-year lawsuit came as Trump pressured Republican states to redraw maps to give the party more seats in the midterms.
Repealing Proposition 4 wouldn’t have changed which map was used in this year’s midterm, but could have given the state a way to redraw the maps for 2028.
Utahns for Representative Government received and spent millions in donations from a dark money group that helped finance Trump’s 2024 campaign. Conservative activist Scott Presler flew into Utah to help drum up support for the repeal effort. Turning Point Action also helped gather signatures.
But there was also a campaign for signature removal.
Better Boundaries, the group behind the 2018 proposition, has been encouraging petition signers to remove their signatures. The group mailed prefilled forms to those individuals, along with stamped envelopes to submit the removal request.
However, in the first week of March, state lawmakers passed a law banning county clerks from accepting removal requests if they were in an envelope with pre-paid postage, effective immediately. This meant that if a county clerk received a removal request in a pre-stamped envelope after the law was signed March 7, they couldn’t count it. The law was changed after Axson’s group sued Better Boundaries for using stamped envelopes, alleging a violation of state law.
Even with that last-minute change, there were still enough signature removals in the end to keep the initiative off the ballot. The deadline for the Republican group to turn in any new signatures was Feb. 15.
“We have significant concerns about the practices utilized by the opposition and continue to review the signature validation and removal process,” Axson said in his statement.
He added that “Utahns spoke loudly in the face of an unprecedented onslaught of biased media coverage, outside influence and judicial interference.”
The fight over the repeal effort was at times ugly. Some signers felt like the signature gatherers misled them, according to reporting by KSL and the Salt Lake Tribune. There were also some potentially fraudulent signatures turned in. Axson said those signature gatherers were fired. There were also reports of gatherers being assaulted and having signature packets stolen.
