The Republican-backed Utahns for Representative Government submitted thousands of signature packets Sunday in their effort to repeal Proposition 4 and restore the Legislature’s ability to gerrymander political boundaries.
Organizers of the repeal effort said they have now turned in well over 200,000 signatures, above the 140,748 threshold to qualify for the November ballot.
In addition to the overall signature target, UFRG has to get signatures from 8% of the registered in 26 of the state’s 29 senate districts.
County clerks are now in the process of validating the signatures and allocating them to the corresponding state senate districts. Opponents of the repeal effort also have 45 days to convince those who signed the petitions to withdraw their names. So far, 2,392 names have been removed.
As of Friday, UFRG had 117,114 verified signatures and needed more than 23,000 more, according to the latest tally from the lieutenant governor’s office.
Additionally, the group has met the required threshold in five of the 29 state senate districts.
The deadline for Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, Utah’s top elections official, to declare if the GOP signature-gathering effort was a success is April 29.
If UFRG meets its targets, voters will decide in November whether to repeal Proposition 4, the 2018 voter-passed citizen initiative — commonly known as the Better Boundaries initiative — that created an independent redistricting commission, established neutral redistricting criteria and banned partisan gerrymandering.
It is part of the Utah Republican effort to undo a series of court rulings that resulted in a court-imposed congressional map that created a Democratic-leaning district in Salt Lake County.
If voters opt to repeal Proposition 4, it will not impact the map in place for the 2026 election, but lawmakers could redraw the maps in 2028.