When I moved here in 2002, I was stunned to see an initiative on the ballot. I had never seen that before because New York is one of 26 states that does not have direct democracy. If voters want a policy change in New York, they need to vote for someone to make those decisions for them, which is a form of representative democracy. The only time New York voters have a say is on a constitutional amendment.

A political battle has been raging in Utah over the last few months over how the Legislature did or did not follow the expectations of Proposition 4 in 2018, when it apportioned voters for the congressional districts after the 2020 census. The Legislature drew lines, and a group of plaintiffs sued, saying lawmakers didn’t do what voters wanted. The judge agreed with the plaintiffs and told the Legislature to redraw the lines within a very short timeline.

This led to an exciting series of committee hearings and court cases, in which we all learned about how we decide if there is partisan bias when districts are drawn. As it turns out, there are a number of tests the Legislature could use to make sure it was abiding by Proposition 4’s expectation that there isn’t gerrymandering, and Democrats argued the Legislature picked the most generous-to-Republicans test possible. During this time, the Utah Republican Party sent out a text asking Republicans to tell their legislators that they want Map C. Then, when the Legislature chose Map C, state Republicans filed their own ballot initiative to block Map C from going into effect. This led to the Utah Democratic Party sending texts to fundraise off the indignation Utahns feel about redistricting.

The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., weighed in on the social platform X, telling Utahns that the districts should be drawn by the Legislature. Speaker Mike Schultz posted a video explaining why the state Legislature has sole constitutional authority to draw district lines. Then, the judge chose a map drawn by the plaintiffs, resulting in a seat a Utah Democrat could win. This led to prominent Democrats announcing their runs for Congress, one of whom has a Bernie Sanders endorsement.

These have been some of the most exciting months in state politics I have ever seen in Utah. I lived off this content, talking with my students about the maps and redistricting. I had classes vote on which map they thought would be good. Interestingly, one class thought the map that put Ogden in with Moab was the best one. We then had a lengthy conversation about voting against one’s interests while they tried to persuade me that Ogden and Moab had a lot in common. I was beyond thrilled that the universe delivered to me a beautiful case in point on redistricting. However, unless you were in my class, you may have not even known this all was happening. According to a Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll, 28% of Utahns had not followed this conversation at all. Another 41% only tracked what was happening a little bit. This episode in Utah politics has been the biggest fight between the Legislature and the judiciary I have ever seen. And 69% of Utahns barely registered it.

This natural experiment has proven to me that democracy is best when it is a representative one. More than two-thirds of Utahns were not following the redistricting conversation well enough to have an informed opinion about where the authority to draw districts should reside. Given that, why on earth are we asking them to vote on a policy about who should draw the lines? And quite frankly, given that, why are we ever asking voters what they think about any policy?

Most people do not have the time or the expertise to follow a political issue of this complexity well. And most political issues are this complex. Most people would rather spend their time on probably anything else. This is why we choose representatives, who are nerdy folks interested in all things politics, to make decisions for us. If we do not like what they do, we can vote for someone else in the next election. If we want to inform them as to what we want, we can email them our opinions as the session progresses.

Leah Murray is a Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor of Political Science and the director of the Olene S. Walker Institute of Politics & Public Service at Weber State University. This commentary is provided through a partnership with Weber State. The views expressed by the author do not necessarily represent the institutional values or positions of the university.