However, “partisan gerrymandering” is not what this litigation is really about. The plaintiffs’ real argument is not complicated, and well understood by Utahans. Using the figures from the last congressional election in 2024, 32.52% of Utah voters voted for Democratic candidates, yet all of Utah’s four congressional seats went to Republicans. Given their vote share, Democrats are entitled to at least one of those seats in the U. S. House of Representatives. The plaintiffs’ proposed maps would make this outcome likely in the 2026 election. The electoral system which prioritizes such results is called “proportional representation.”

This argument is not outrageous. Many democratic nations use proportional representation to allocate the seats in their legislatures. Generally, under such systems voters vote for a political party rather than a particular candidate. The votes are then aggregated across the entire political unit (nation, sate, province, etc.) governed by the legislature in question, and the legislative seats divvied up (sometimes subject to minimum vote levels) among the political parties in proportion to their percentage of the aggregate votes. Such systems assure that most voters will have someone who shares their views in the legislature, as proportional representation encourages multiple political parties. A primary drawback, among many, is that one party rarely achieves a majority, resulting in often unstable coalition governments.

As abstractly appealing as proportional representation may be, this is not the system we use in the United States. Like many other democratic countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, we use a system colloquially called “first-past-the-post,” where the candidate who receives the most votes in a district wins, even if they received less than a majority. (Some U. S. states and France require a run-off if no one gets a majority). While this means that the supporters of a losing candidate may not get their favored party in the legislature, first-past-the-post encourages larger political parties and more stable governments. It also gives power to local communities whose influence is suppressed under proportional representation because their votes are washed into the national aggregates of the party organizations, rather than going to a specific candidate with whom local people are familiar.

A short opinion piece is not the place to elaborate on the pros and cons of these two voting systems. The critical point for the current Utah redistricting lawsuit is that these are very different systems which can yield very different outcomes from the same election results. Using the results one would get under proportional representation to test a first-past-the-post system, as plaintiffs urge in this case, effectively changes the latter into the former. And it does so under the backdoor subterfuge of trying to define “partisan gerrymandering” rather than forthrightly declaring that the real goal is to profoundly change Utah’s voting system into one which has never before been used in the United States.

This is not the first time Democrats have urged such a change. In the last decade a major litigation campaign was launched against Republican-led states to get them to apply proportional representation standards under the guise of fighting “partisan gerrymandering.” As in the current Utah case, the plaintiffs were nominally neutral but actually functioned as surrogates for the Democratic party.

This campaign ended in defeat in the United States Supreme Court in the case of Rucho vs. Common Cause. In the Court’s opinion Chief Justice Roberts noted that “partisan gerrymandering claims invariably sound in a desire for proportional representation … such claims are based on a conviction that the greater the departure from proportionality, the more suspect an apportionment plan becomes. Our cases, however, clearly foreclose any claim that the Constitution requires proportional representation or that legislatures in reapportioning must draw district lines to come as near as possible to allocating seats to the contending parties in proportion to what their anticipated statewide vote will be.” The Court further concluded that there was no way to test for “partisan gerrymandering” which met the constitutional requirement that the test be “clear, manageable and politically neutral.”

If the United States Supreme Court could not find such a test, why would a lone state lower court judge think that she can? And for such a lone lower court judge to fundamentally alter Utah’s electoral system by judicial fiat would be an offense against democracy far worse than anything Donald Trump has been accused of.

James W. Lucas is a retired attorney who lives in Salt Lake City. He is the author of Are We The People? How We The People Can Take Charge of Our Constitution, which proposes a bipartisan revival of the constitutional amendment process, and Timely Renewed: Amendment to Restore the American Constitution, which includes a geometry-based anti-gerrymandering proposal.