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 eight signatures shy of meeting the mark it needs to qualify in the last of 26 required state Senate districts.

Davis County Clerk Brian McKenzie said a Friday afternoon count of the final petition packets yielded another 56 signatures in that last district, represented by Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, unofficially putting it over the top by 48.

But it’s not over yet.

McKenzie said his office also has signature removal forms it has received over the past “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.”

Additionally, opponents of the repeal effort have 45 days after each petition signature is posted online to persuade individuals to rescind their support.

Davis County is also going over all rejected signatures a second time — those that were not counted because the voter wasn’t registered or the signatures weren’t legible — to ensure 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, Utahns for Representative Government had gathered 157,898 verified signatures, surpassing the statewide goal, according to a tally from the Utah lieutenant governor’s office.

Opposition groups now know they will need to get roughly 48 voters in Adams’ district to remove their signatures to keep the repeal of Proposition 4 — the 2018 voter-passed initiative that banned partisan gerrymandering — off the ballot.

The group Better Boundaries has been sending prefilled removal forms to everyone who signed the petitions along with a stamped, addressed envelope voters can use to mail them back.

So far, more than 4,000 Utahns have removed their signatures. Some voters have said they were misled about the purpose of the petition when they were asked to sign it.

Over the weekend, U.S. Rep. Blake Moore, who was co-chair of Better Boundaries before running for Congress, posted a video message on social media encouraging Better Boundaries to stop its removal efforts and “let the voters decide in November.”

Overall, Friday’s update was good news for Utahns for Representative Government, 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 a mere 27 signatures.

Adams, whose Senate District 7 could decide whether the initiative makes the ballot, has been perhaps the state’s most vocal critic of Prop 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.

The Senate president 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.

On Friday, when asked by The Salt Lake Tribune about the thin signature margin in his district, Adams downplayed the drama.

“There’s 28 other districts,” he said.

If Utahns for Representative Government successfully repeals Prop 4, it would allow the GOP-dominated Legislature to redraw the maps for 2028, and, if it chooses, gerrymander them without the constraints imposed by the initiative.

Republican legislators, who are hostile toward the grassroots initiative, have made the process to qualify for the ballot 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.

Update, 2:55 p.m. • This story has been updated to include additional signature counts and comments from elected officials.