It’s time for lawmakers to do the right thing.
On Monday, Utah’s Independent Redistricting Commission will present its suggested political maps to a legislative committee that oversees the once-a-decade process of creating the state’s political boundaries.
The submissions include three options apiece for congressional maps, as well as Utah House, Senate and Board of Education districts, and are the result of a new system aimed at bringing much-needed transparency to the proceedings, including months of discussion and public input.
The bipartisan commission, created from the Better Boundaries ballot initiative in 2018, was tasked with drawing the maps under a range of guidelines meant to promote fairness and eliminate gerrymandering, such as keeping “communities of interest” intact and steering clear of favoring candidates or political parties.
Are the proposed maps flawless? Hardly. Redistricting is such a complicated task that perfection is unattainable, and the various maps proposed for Summit County are unlikely to please everyone. But they appear to be a marked improvement over the current situation. In any case, Summit County residents and other Utahns can at least take heart in the fact that the process used to create them played out in public view and incorporated feedback from Utahns at more than a dozen public hearings around the state.
The trouble, though, is this: The Legislature, which in accordance with the state Constitution has the final say over political boundaries, is under no obligation to use the commission’s maps. Lawmakers have the authority to tweak the proposals however they see fit — for whatever reason — or throw them out entirely and use their own. And they are not bound by the same common-sense guidelines that structured the independent commission’s work, meaning they have free reign, if they please, to gerrymander the boundaries the same way they have in the past.
Utahns of all political stripes must make clear to their representatives at the Statehouse that doing so is unacceptable and that blatantly disregarding the commission’s work would come with consequences. That’s only possible, of course, if Republicans and Democrats alike are willing to punish at the ballot box any legislator who votes to throw out the commission’s maps. And why not? This is not a partisan issue, but rather one that strikes at the heart of our democracy.
As the saying goes, people deserve to pick their representatives rather than the other way around. And we deserve lawmakers who are committed to respecting that truth, even if they aren’t legally bound to do so.