GERRYMANDERING in Utah - Report on the Public meeting in Logan, Utah on
November 3rd for an initiative to repeal of Utah law (Proposition 4) requiring fair House district maps be drawn
It started with the microphone. Well, it started with the chairs. On Monday, November 3, former Congressman Rob Bishop, a Republican from Brigham City, Utah, appeared in a meeting room in the Logan Library to conduct a hearing (which it really wasn’t) for a proposed initiative to go on the 2026 ballot. There were about 20 chairs. Several of us said they’d need more chairs. Mr. Bishop was doubtful. With about 50 people at the start of the meeting, and about 75 at its peak, we added a lot of chairs over the original 20 or so that they had put out. And a few people stood.
Mr Bishop started the hearing with some opening remarks on his topic – the effort to repeal the results of Proposition 4 (Prop. 4) which is a voter approved Initiative in 2018 that created an independent redistricting commission to determine fair political district maps for elections of our four Congress persons in Utah. This became law. The Prop. 4 process was tried in 2021, and then the our state legislature ignored the recommended maps enacting their own, gerrymandered maps splitting Salt Lake City County into 4 districts. Lawsuits took years and in 2025 our State Supreme Court said they couldn’t ignore Prop. 4 because it is law. After which Republican members of the state legislature wanted to change how state supreme court judges are selected, and started to find new ways to ignore laws created by voter approved initiatives.
Rob Bishop has a quiet voice - unusual for a former state representative, congressman, and a teacher. So I spoke up and asked him to use a microphone. He seemed annoyed by the request, and he blamed the lack of a microphone on the library - “the library was supposed to set that up for us, but they didn’t do it”. After which a woman (who was not introduced) there to run the meeting with him, went to the anteroom, found a microphone, turned it on. Problem solved in about 15 seconds. From Rob Bishop’s long experience, one would have thought that he’d have worked out how to be heard by people.
The hearing is a requirement for any group hoping to put an Initiative on the Utah ballot. The group must have at least seven hearings, one in each of seven regions of the state, and meet other conditions, few of which seem to help shape the language or intent of the initiative - they seem to be impediments to ever getting an initiative on the ballot. This is, of course, by design, as new rules were passed in the last 10 years to make initiatives more difficult in Utah. Logan, the 17th largest town in Utah, was at the time, the largest city to have a hearing. The law that governs the initiative process doesn’t give any guidance as to how the hearings should run. Rob Bishop outlined their rules for the hearing, which it wasn’t – no questions allowed or to be read into the record. This wasn’t a debate; we were not there to discuss policy. People would be given 2 minutes to make a statement. We could make only statements - questions would not be recorded into whatever record was going to be made. After 60 minutes of statement time, the hearing was over. The 60 minutes is required by law.
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