Republican legislators could make it easier for them to implement new congressional maps that retain four safe Republican districts, based on a draft of a bill unveiled Sunday. Utah’s Legislative Redistricting Committee met Monday in its first public hearing to discuss five newly drawn congressional maps and the proposed legislation.
Lawmakers are currently redrawing congressional maps, as directed by the courts. Under the judge’s order, lawmakers have to draw the new maps to comply with requirements in 2018’s Better Boundaries initiative, also known as Proposition 4.
That initiative prohibits the commission from drawing districts “that purposefully or unduly favors or disfavors any incumbent elected official, candidate or prospective candidate for elective office, or any political party.” The law currently lets a judge use “the best available data and scientific and statistical methods” to determine if the boundaries meet that standard.
But new legislation from Sen. Brady Brammer, R-Pleasant Grove, would create a formula for determining “partisan symmetry” by looking at the margins of victory for Republicans in the three previous elections for statewide offices — president, governor, attorney general, auditor and treasurer — and deem the maps to not be biased as long as the advantage for Republicans isn’t greater than the margin of GOP victories in those races.
Republicans won those races by an average margin of about 30 percentage points. That means that, theoretically, Republican lawmakers could adopt four districts that each give GOP candidates an advantage of up to 30 percentage points while still passing the partisan symmetry test.
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Sen. Brady Brammer, R-Pleasant Grove, presents draft legislation during a meeting of the Legislative Redistricting Committee at the Capitol in Salt Lake City, Monday, Sept. 22, 2025.
The proposed bill would also make Brammer’s partisan symmetry test the only method that could be used to determine if the maps are fair — a point that frustrated Democrats on the redistricting committee.
“Are you concerned about the optics of that?” redistricting committee member Rep. Doug Owens, D-Millcreek, asked Brammer at Monday’s meeting. “The court says ‘Follow Prop 4,’ and the first thing out of the chute, we’re narrowing Prop 4?”
Brammer said he was not. The court has given the Legislature discretion to define how partisan bias is measured, he said, and adopting one test ensures that there won’t be a “food fight between experts” arguing about how to measure bias.
He said his test prevents the minority Democratic party from being “packed” into one district and creating three other safe Republican seats. That way, he said, voters can determine the outcome of elections, not the map.
But members of the public who spoke Monday were uniformly opposed to Brammer’s proposed change.
(Christopher Cherrington | The Salt Lake Tribune)
Sen. Luz Escamilla, D-Salt Lake City, is proposing an alternative that would use other statistical methods to analyze the maps. The committee did not take action on either of those competing proposals, but likely will when it meets again Thursday.
Tiffany Smith of Millcreek argued that Proposition 4 provided for multiple measures and metrics to be used to determine if the boundaries are fair to all parties and urged the Legislature to respect the will of the voters who passed the initiative and not adopt Brammer’s alternative.
Judge Dianna Gibson has voided the congressional maps that have been in place since 2021, ruling last month that the Legislature should not have been allowed to repeal the voter-passed Better Boundaries initiative and new maps needed to be drawn that follow the standards in Proposition 4.
The Legislature has begun that map-drawing process, releasing five options for new maps over the weekend that were drawn by Sean Trende, who has been hired by the committee to consult on the process. Trende acknowledged that he has generally, but not exclusively, consulted for Republicans on redistricting issues.
(Chris Samuels | The Salt Lake Tribune) Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla, left, D-Salt Lake City, and Rep. Doug Owens, D-Millcreek, converse during a meeting of the Legislative Redistricting Committee at the Capitol in Salt Lake City, Monday, Sept. 22, 2025.
“This is unusual and, quite honestly, a first in our process of redistricting,” said committee co-chair Sen. Scott Sandall, R-Tremonton, during Monday morning’s hearing. “We are doing this in compliance with the court’s orders and under protest, but we want to make sure we maintain our constitutional duty to produce a map, so we are going to proceed in that direction.”
Dozens of members of the public commented on the new maps — none were satisfied, although the new maps were generally considered an improvement over the map that the court struck down.
“It does seem to me that the Legislature is intent on slicing up my county every which way possible and every way it can be legally allowed to do so. Let’s make no mistake that is the non-elephant-shaped elephant in the room,” said James Carter, a Salt Lake City resident. “How much butchering of my municipality are we going to do?’
The five new maps still divide Salt Lake County because it is too populous to be confined to one district, although lawmakers only slice the county once, rather than cutting it into four districts like the previous maps had done.
The Legislature is expected to settle on a map by Thursday, give the public 10 days for comment, and adopt the final map by Oct. 6. The new map would then be submitted to Gibson, who will decide whether it complies with the initiative’s standards. If it does not, she could choose a map submitted by the plaintiffs who sued to have the maps invalidated.
According to the lieutenant governor’s office, the new map needs to be in place by Nov. 10 in order to prepare for the 2026 midterm elections.