The Utah Supreme Court declined Friday to hear the Republican Legislature’s last-ditch effort to prevent a court-imposed congressional map with a Democrat-leaning district from being used in the 2026 midterm election.
With a Feb. 23 deadline for electoral boundaries to be finalized, according to Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, the primary and general elections will proceed — barring a last-minute intervention by the federal courts or other unforeseen events — with the map selected by 3rd District Judge Dianna Gibson.
Chief Justice Matthew Durrant, writing for the court’s three-member motions panel, said that the Legislature, under a law it passed last year, could have filed an appeal any time after either of Gibson’s two rulings in August and November.
“However, the 30 days to appeal passed, and no appeal was filed,” Durrant wrote.
“To be sure, we agree with the district court that this case, and its August 25 order, raise important legal issues that warrant timely appellate review,” the chief justice wrote. “Had either the August 25 or November 10 Orders been appealed … we would have had statutory jurisdiction over those appeals even though those orders were interlocutory.”
But because they weren’t appealed, and because other issues are still pending in the case and not fully resolved, the justices said they don’t have jurisdiction under court rules to consider the Legislature’s appeal.
One challenge to Gibson’s map remains: U.S. Reps. Burgess Owens and Celeste Maloy have an appeal pending in federal court. The representatives argue the U.S. Constitution gives the Legislature the authority to draw district boundaries and Gibson cannot be allowed to intervene in that process.
A three-judge federal panel heard arguments in that case Wednesday, and two of the three pressed the lawyer for Owens and Maloy on why the judge shouldn’t step in when the Legislature fails to fulfill its duty to produce a lawful map.
Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, whose office oversees state elections, has said a final map must be in place by Monday.
If the federal court declines to intervene, it will mark the culmination — at least for the 2026 election cycle — of nearly four years of litigation stemming from Utah voters’ passage of Proposition 4. The initiative created an independent redistricting commission, established neutral criteria for setting political boundaries and prohibited manipulating the districts to favor one party over the other.
Elizabeth Rasmussen, executive director of Better Boundaries, the group that backed Proposition 4, said lawmakers had chances to pass a fair map that complied with the initiative and opportunities to appeal Gibson’s ruling.
“When lawmakers ignore voters and then ignore appellate deadlines, there are consequences,” she said. “Today’s dismissal reinforces a basic principle: the will of the people — and the rule of law — cannot be brushed aside. The Supreme Court’s order demonstrates that even lawmakers must follow the law.”
Legislative leaders did not immediately comment on the court’s ruling Friday night.
Katharine Biele, president of the League of Women Voters of Utah, said voters “deserve fair representation and clarity” and the court’s decision will allow the election to move forward without disruption.
And Mark Gaber, the attorney with the Campaign Legal Center who represented the plaintiffs, said the decision means “for the first time in decades, Utah voters will vote under a fair congressional map that respects local communities and treats all Utahns equally.”
The Better Boundaries initiative
The Legislature largely gutted 2018’s Proposition 4, known as the Better Boundaries initiative, and adopted districts in 2021 that created four safe Republican seats. A group of voters, along with the League of Women Voters and Mormon Women for Ethical Government, sued, arguing that undoing Proposition 4 effectively stripped voters of their constitutional right to the initiative process.
The Utah Supreme Court unanimously agreed and sent the case back to Gibson, who declared in a ruling last summer that “Proposition 4 is the law in Utah,” and, because the Legislature’s congressional map did not comply with the law, the boundaries had to be redrawn.
The Legislature’s second attempt also failed to meet the law’s guidelines, Gibson ruled, and she chose a map submitted by the plaintiffs with the Salt Lake County-centered district that favors Democrats by as much as 17 percentage points.
Republican legislators were furious, and last month, appealed the ruling, asking the justices to set aside Gibson’s chosen map. Friday’s ruling rejects that appeal.
Last December, they passed a resolution condemning both the Supreme Court and Gibson for judicial activism and stripped the justices of the power to pick their own chief justice, and instead gave that right to the governor.
This session, the Republican-led Legislature added two justices to the Supreme Court — a move opponents of the legislation considered court-packing — and created a three-judge panel to hear challenges to state laws.
Meanwhile, the GOP-backed Utahns for Representative Government is trying to put a measure before voters in the 2026 election to fully repeal Proposition 4. They have gathered more than 117,000 of the 140,748 signatures they need to qualify for the ballot.
If it makes it on the ballot and is approved, it would not impact the 2026 congressional race, but would enable Republican legislators to redraw the maps for 2028 in any way they see fit.
Senate President J. Stuart Adams also said on Friday that the Legislature intends to propose a constitutional amendment changing how initiatives are treated under the law, but details are still being worked out.
They had tried to pass such an amendment in 2024, but the Supreme Court struck it from the ballot.