A ruling is expected Monday on whether the Legislature illegally gerrymandered Utah’s congressional districts and needs to redraw the boundaries.
And it appears that Judge Dianna Gibson’s ruling may not yet be the end of the yearslong legal back and forth between voting rights groups and the state.
“The Judge has indicated to me her decision will be issued on Monday,” an email from the judge’s staff sent to parties in the case Friday reads. “That being said, the court has set a Status Conference on Friday, August 29, 2025, at 10:00 a.m.”
Elizabeth Rasmussen, executive director of Better Boundaries, the group behind the 2018 anti-gerrymandering initiative, said she is “cautiously optimistic” they will prevail.
The status conference on Friday likely signals that more proceedings are coming. If the state were to prevail in Gibson’s decision Monday, the boundaries drawn by the Legislature would stand, and there would be nothing left to litigate before Gibson.
But if Gibson rules that the Legislature overstepped its authority in significantly undoing 2018’s citizen-passed Better Boundaries initiative, which sought to prohibit politically gerrymandered districts, new districts would need to be drawn and more proceedings in Gibson’s court.
If new congressional districts — the only maps challenged by the lawsuit — need to be drawn, they would have to be done quickly, or they will likely not be in place in time for the 2026 election. The lieutenant governor’s office has said in court filings that the boundaries need to be set by Nov. 1 so that candidates for Congress can file in January for next fall’s midterm elections.
“We’re still going to push for 2026, for fair maps, and that really does depend on what the ruling is. We anticipate appeals if it is positive, but we’re going to push for [new maps] as soon as possible,” Rasmussen said. “Overall, what we’re looking for is fair representation — and the sooner we can get that, the better.”
Attorneys for the Legislature have said in court briefs that, if they lose before Gibson, they intend to appeal the ruling to the Utah Supreme Court and potentially to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The impending ruling has been long-awaited by both sides. Gibson heard arguments in the case back in January and asked for additional briefs in April. Since, the parties have been watching and waiting for the judge to act.
The decision comes as Texas and California are actively trying to redraw their congressional boundaries to create new, safe districts for Republicans and Democrats, respectively, and gain a partisan advantage heading into the 2026 midterm elections that will decide which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives.
“Protected from government infringement”
In 2018, Better Boundaries ran the ballot initiative aimed at creating an independent redistricting commission to redraw Utah’s political boundaries after the 2020 Census, the intent being to eliminate gerrymandering — or drawing political boundaries benefiting one party to the detriment of another.
The initiative passed, but before the commission did its work, the Legislature significantly weakened the voter-approved law, making the commission’s work advisory-only.
Republican lawmakers then ignored the commission’s recommendations and adopted maps that created four safe GOP congressional districts.
The League of Women Voters, Mormon Women for Ethical Government and a handful of affected voters sued, arguing that the Utah Constitution guarantees the public a right to run ballot initiatives to reform government and that right becomes meaningless when the Legislature can repeal or significantly alter the will of voters.
Last July, the Utah Supreme Court unanimously agreed.
“We hold that when Utahns exercise their right to reform the government through a citizen initiative, their exercise of these rights is protected from government infringement,” wrote Justice Paige Peterson for the five justices — all of them Republican appointees. “This means that government-reform initiatives are constitutionally protected from unfettered legislative amendment, repeal, or replacement.”
While the Supreme Court’s initial ruling regarding ballot initiatives was a blow to the Legislature’s redistricting, the justices did not scrap the congressional boundaries Republican lawmakers had drawn. Instead, they sent the case back to Gibson to decide if the Legislature had a compelling reason to undo the anti-gerrymandering initiative and, if it did not, to determine what should be done to fix the constitutional violation.
Attorneys for the Legislature argued lawmakers have the power under the U.S. Constitution to draw maps they want. Even if the decision to rescind most of the anti-gerrymandering initiative was unconstitutional under the Supreme Court’s ruling, they argued, it doesn’t mean that the boundaries the Legislature adopted were automatically invalid.
Trying to get the boundaries thrown out, lawyers for the League of Women Voters and MWEG contended that, if the court reinstates the language citizens approved in the initiative, the districts the Legislature drew would not comply with the standards or procedures voters wanted and have to be redrawn.
And last fall, Republican legislators tried to supersede the Supreme Court’s initiative ruling by amending the Utah Constitution to make clear that legislators could repeal or alter any ballot initiative they wanted for any reason.
But again, the Supreme Court stepped in, voiding the amendment on two grounds.
First, justices said the Legislature had failed to comply with a constitutional requirement to publish amendments in newspapers ahead of the election, and second, the ballot question written by House Speaker Mike Schultz and Senate President J. Stuart Adams was so misleading that voters opposed to weakening the initiative power would likely have ended up voting for the GOP Legislature’s amendment.