The Republican-led effort to repeal Utah’s ban on partisan gerrymandering is teetering on the narrowest of ledges, in serious peril of failing to make it onto November’s ballot.
As of Friday morning, Utahns for Representative Government was just eight signatures shy of meeting the mark it needs to qualify in the last of 26 required Senate districts.
However, Davis County Clerk Brian McKenzie said in an interview Friday morning that his staff has only three signature packets left to process.
Even if UFRG can get the last eight signatures it needs, McKenzie said his office also has a stack of signature removal forms it has received over the last “four or five days” that have not been processed.
“We have a pretty good bunch [of removal forms],” McKenzie said. “We set those aside because we knew processing the petitions would be the priority for us.”
The county is also going over all of the rejected signatures a second time — those that were not counted because the voter wasn’t registered or the signatures weren’t legible — to make sure that nothing was improperly denied.
“We want to make sure anything that was missed that should not have been missed gets counted,” he said.
There is no recount mechanism in state law for an initiative petition. However, whichever party comes out on the losing end will certainly sue to contest the tally.
As of Friday morning, the day after UFRG met their statewatch threshold of support, 157,898 verified signatures had been processed, according to a tally from the Utah lieutenant governor’s office.
Even after the last signature is verified, opponents of UFRG’s effort to repeal Proposition 4 — a 2018 voter-passed initiative that banned partisan gerrymandering — that is not the end of it.
Opposition groups are actively trying to convince voters who signed the petition to submit a form to their county clerks to rescind their support. There is a 45-day knock-off window starting from the time an individual’s name shows up on the lieutenant governor’s list of verified signatures during which the voter can remove their name.
Other than the uncertainty around Senate District 7, Friday’s update was good news for UFRG, as it passed the threshold in five more Senate districts to qualify in 25 of the 26 it needs — although in Senate District 8, also in Davis County, it currently has done so by just 27 signatures.
Senate District 7 is currently held by Senate President J. Stuart Adams, who has been perhaps the state’s most vocal critic of Proposition 4’s gerrymandering prohibition. He’s also decried the courts’ rulings that struck down the Legislature’s congressional maps and imposed a new map with a Democratic-leaning district in Salt Lake County.
Adams and his Republican colleagues have lost their appeals and, barring some unforeseen intervention, the court’s map will be used in the November congressional elections.
UFRG is aiming to use the initiative to repeal Proposition 4 and allow the GOP-dominated Legislature to redraw the maps for 2028 and, if they choose, gerrymander them without the constraints imposed by the initiative.
Republican legislators, who are hostile toward the citizen initiative, have made the process to qualify for an initiative extremely difficult. Still, falling short would be a crushing defeat for the group that had support from President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, Gov. Spencer Cox, other state leaders and conservative social media influencers, as well as $4.3 million in financial backing from a Trump-aligned group.