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- A GOP-led effort to repeal Prop 4 likely won't be on November's ballot.
- The initiative fell short by over 250 signatures in Senate District 15.
- Despite setbacks, GOP vows to continue efforts to repeal Prop 4 in future.
SALT LAKE CITY — A Republican-led effort to repeal Proposition 4 will likely not be on the ballot this November, after the effort fell below the threshold for signatures in the tipping-point Senate district.
The failure to qualify for the ballot is a major blow to the GOP, which had support from President Donald Trump and received more than $4 million from a group aligned with the president to help collect signatures.
The initiative turned in more than 200,000 signatures by the deadline on Feb. 15 and ultimately met signature thresholds in the necessary 26 of the 29 counties. Thousands of Utahns have since removed their names as Better Boundaries — the group that sponsored the original anti-gerrymandering initiative in 2018 — and other groups have campaigned in some of the tightest districts, encouraging voters to rescind their support.
Senate District 15, held by Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights, has been hanging by a thread since last week, but fell short by more than 250 signatures by Thursday morning, according to unofficial tracking by Morgan and May Public Affairs.
The lieutenant governor has yet to officially declare the initiative insufficient.
Rob Axson, the chairman of the Utah Republican Party and head of the repeal initiative, said the group still has "significant concerns about the practices utilized by the opposition and continues to review the signature validation and removal process."
"Given today's update, we want to thank the hundreds of thousands of Utahns who signed our initiative," he told KSL in a statement. "Utahns spoke loudly in the face on an unprecedented onslaught of biased media coverage, outside influence and judicial interference. Whether now or in the future, by litigation or initiative, we will repeal Prop 4. The fight is not over but just beginning."
Elizabeth Rasmussen, the executive director of Better Boundaries, said it would still help Utahns remove their signatures until the deadline.
"A well-informed voting population leads to better outcomes for everyone," she said. "A majority of Utah voters approved Prop 4 in 2018 and we look forward to the day when Utah voters can finally pick their politicians, not the other way around."
This all comes after months of signature gathering from thousands of volunteers and paid gatherers beginning late last year. The fight over ballot access became increasingly tense in recent months amid reports of misleading claims made by some gatherers and reports of assault and theft against a handful of those collecting signatures.
As the push to get voters to remove their names ramped up last month, the group behind the repeal accused Better Boundaries in a lawsuit of indirectly paying voters to remove their names from the petition by sending out prefilled removal forms with paid postage.
The Utah Legislature later got involved in the waning hours of the recent legislative session to prohibit prepaid postage on signature removal requests. The change took effect when Gov. Spencer Cox signed the bill into law hours later.
Utahns for Representative Government, the organization behind the repeal effort, had three months to collect signatures from 8% of voters statewide, along with 8% of voters in at least 26 of the 29 state Senate districts. The deadline for signature collection passed on Feb. 15, but voters can request to have their names removed for up to 45 days after their validated signature appears online.
The repeal effort initially cleared all but three Senate districts — District 9, District 13 and District 14 — all held by Democrats in Salt Lake County.
Republicans have been trying for years to overturn Proposition 4, which was narrowly approved by voters in 2018. The law created an independent commission to advise state lawmakers on drawing political boundaries and established guidelines to prevent partisan gerrymandering.
The GOP-dominated Legislature did away with Proposition 4 in 2021, replacing it with a separate advisory committee to recommend maps and getting rid of the standards for maps. Lawmakers then approved a new congressional map that split Salt Lake County between each of Utah's four congressional districts, giving Republicans an advantage in each.
Several Salt Lake County residents sued the Legislature over the maps in 2022, with help from Mormon Women for Ethical Government and the League of Women Voters of Utah, alleging that lawmakers had violated a provision of the Utah Constitution that gives voters the power to "alter or reform" their government.
The Utah Supreme Court agreed in 2024, ruling that lawmakers had overstepped. A lower court judge then threw out the old map in August of last year, prompting a race to redraw them.
Lawmakers adopted a new map in October, but that was also subsequently thrown out by the same judge who said it also failed to follow the redistricting standards. In its place, a 3rd District judge selected a remedial map submitted by the plaintiffs in the case, which creates a Democratic-leaning district in Salt Lake County.
After state and federal courts declined to block the new map's implementation, it will remain in place for at least the upcoming election cycle, though the failure to qualify for the ballot is likely not the end of efforts to undo Proposition 4.
State lawmakers are expected to propose a constitutional amendment later this year that would give the Legislature power to overturn citizen ballot initiatives. That would still need to be approved by a majority of voters. If it were, it would make any future initiatives to repeal Proposition 4 moot, as lawmakers could overturn it themselves, clearing the way to draw boundaries free from any constraints.
Speaking to reporters last week, Cox said he anticipated a proposed amendment but had not had conversations with legislative leaders about what that would look like. Cox was supportive of the effort to repeal Proposition 4, but acknowledged that state leaders had intentionally raised the bar for qualifying initiatives.
"I signed the initiative and so if it fails, it fails," he said. "We've tried to make it really hard to get initiatives on a ballot. I think that legislating via initiative is terrible. I think it's bad for our state. ... We've made those laws in Utah and so I have to stand by those, even if it's for something I want, it doesn't always work out that way."
