Erin Ruzek and her sister had stopped for groceries near Kimball Junction outside of Park City last month when they were approached by two men gathering signatures for a ballot initiative intended to repeal Utah’s independent redistricting commission and a law banning partisan gerrymandering.
Ruzek said she told them no thanks. She supports 3rd District Judge Dianna Gibson’s decision to discard the Legislature’s map and instead impose one that created a Democratic-leaning district in Salt Lake County.
“No. This is to show your support for Judge Gibson,” Ruzek said the man told her.
“This is why you want to sign it,” she recalled him saying, “because they are trying to go back and say the map she approved is illegitimate, so by you signing it’s showing your support for Judge Gibson.”
That isn’t true.
Still, Ruzek and her sister were swayed and both of them signed the petition.
When she later realized what she had done, Ruzek felt deceived, and now both women plan to ask their county clerk to remove their names.
The issue stems from the state Republican Party’s efforts to get enough signatures to let Utahns decide whether to repeal the 2018 voter-passed Better Boundaries initiative, which established an independent redistricting commission and barred drawing political boundaries that unfairly advantaged one party over another.
To get there, the party needs signatures from nearly 141,000 Utah voters across the state. But Ruzek and others allege that at least some of the people deployed to collect the signatures are using misleading sales pitches and deceptive tactics.
Trinity Block, an anthropology student at Orem’s Utah Valley University, said she was on her way to class one morning and saw a signature gatherer talking to another student. Block put her head down and tried to hurry past to avoid any interaction.
But the gatherer saw her and began walking with her, asking if she was registered to vote, Block explained, until they got closer to the building. He stepped in front of her, she said, and wouldn’t let her pass.
Block said he told her that the public hadn’t had a chance to vote for Utah’s districts since 2018, and they should.
“He wouldn’t tell me it’s a petition. He would only say, ‘We’re gathering information on who’s registered to vote,’” she said. “He wouldn’t let me go past until I signed this thing. Any time I tried to move a little bit one way, he would do the same thing. … I felt like I kind of had to [sign] to get away from him.”
So she did.
Then there’s Jessie Whitehead, a biology student at the University of Utah, who said she and her friend were approached by a young man on campus encouraging them to sign his petition, telling them that “we want to give fair redistricting back to the people.”
“I was kind of confused and I said, ‘Wait a minute, didn’t they just pass something on that,’” Whitehead recalled. But her friend signed the petition and Whitehead said, “You know what, she signed it. I guess I’ll sign it.”
Whitehead later asked her mother about what she had signed and learned it was an effort to repeal the Better Boundaries initiative.
“I thought, ‘Well that’s great. I didn’t want to do that,’” she said. “I feel like they took advantage of me almost, because I’m a student and not totally involved in the news constantly.”
Familiar criticism
(Bethany Baker | The Salt Lake Tribune) Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson's office oversees elections and initiatives.
Reports of deceptive signature gathering are hardly new. Opponents of a recent referendum to repeal an anti-labor bill accused the union supporters of misrepresenting the facts when they were gathering signatures. Other signature efforts faced criticism through the years.
A spokesperson for Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, who oversees state elections and initiatives, said in a statement that voters with complaints and evidence of deception can contact her office.
At the same time, the statement said, the initiative title — in this case, “Repeal of Independent Redistricting Commission and Standards Act Initiative” — is printed on every signature packet.
“This language is required,” it added, “so regardless of what someone is told, they can read what they are agreeing to if they decide to sign.”
Concerns about voters being tricked or regretting a decision to sign was a key reason why, in 2010, state lawmakers — facing an initiative aimed at creating a new legislative ethics law and another dealing with redistricting — made it easier for voters to remove their names from a petition.
As it stands now, voters need to submit a form to their county clerk requesting removal. The form has to have a physical signature, not an electronic version.
What county clerks say
Utah County Clerk Aaron Davidson said that in Utah County, voters can print the form, sign it and email a photo of the scanned copy to the office. Salt Lake County Clerk Lannie Chapman said her office requires the submission of a printed form on paper.
Chapman said her office had been receiving calls from voters who felt like they had been tricked into signing the redistricting repeal initiative petition and desiring to have their names removed.
Better Boundaries Executive Director Elizabeth Rasmussen said she has been inundated with calls and emails from people with similar complaints. One woman from Park City called nearly in tears, Rasmussen said, after signing a petition.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Elizabeth Rasmussen of Better Boundaries speaks at a news conference in Salt Lake City in August.
“Those calls are every day,” she said. “My inbox is inundated with these things happening.”
In response, Better Boundaries has created a webpage walking voters through the process of removing their signatures — in addition to emphasizing that voters should “decline to sign” the petition.
Utah GOP responds
Utah Republican Party Chair Rob Axson said he believes opponents are trying to exploit whatever isolated issues there might be to smear the effort with the public. Axson said he has sat in on the training sessions for the paid signature gatherers his group — Utahns for Representative Government — hired and that the contractors are given a refresher course every few days.
“I know the standard I will be held to and the conservative side, the Republican side, will be held to, is higher than another initiative,” he said. “I’m sure when you have a thousand volunteers who have gone out and you have several hundred paid gatherers … is there a misspeak that has occurred? I’m sure there will be. But is there any intentional thing that is occurring? Just the opposite.”
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah GOP Chair Robert Axson denies an orchestrated effort to deceive potential petition signers.
Axson estimates his group is about halfway to the 140,748 signatures needed to get the repeal measure on the 2026 ballot. As of Wednesday, more than 18,000 had been validated and reported to the lieutenant governor’s office, but verifying all the signatures submitted is a labor-intensive process that takes time.
Park City resident Ted Palomaki said when he was approached to sign the petition the signature gatherers told them the goal wasn’t to repeal Proposition 4 but rather to give people the map voters had supported four years ago and had been thrown out by the judge.
Not only did Palomaki not sign, he said, he told other people who wandered by that the signature gatherers were misrepresenting the issue and encouraged others not to sign.
“Whatever they’ve been told to get people to sign is exactly wrong,” Palomaki said. “My thought is, this is BS. These people are lying and jumping on the bandwagon, acting like we’re doing this to give the citizens what they want. In reality they are doing just the opposite of what we want.”
Note to readers • This story is available to Salt Lake Tribune subscribers only. Thank you for supporting local journalism.