Tomorrow (Friday, September 6th) at 5pm there will be a livestream panel discussion about the current political landscape. The panel will include UU President Rev. Dr. Sofia Betancourt in conversation with representatives from local grassroots organizations. You can register here.
Also, locally, there's a very important question on the ballot of which we all should be aware.
In the last midterm election, about 63% of the state voted for a Republican representative, and about 32% voted for a Democrat. However, despite Democrats being about 1/3 of the voters, we have four Republican representatives. One reason for this is gerrymandering - our legislative districts have been drawn to insure Republican victories. Our state senate and house districts are structured similarly. In particular, Salt Lake County, our largest and most liberal county, is broken up into all four state representative districts in order to dilute its voting power.
In 2018 there was a statewide citizen ballot initiative that sought to change this. Specifically, it created a 7 person commission to draw the district maps, and placed certain requirements on those maps - like that they should as much as possible respect county lines. This initiative, amazingly, passed (just barely).
The legislature, unsurprisingly, didn't like this law, and so immediately did everything they could to change it. They removed most of the restrictions on the types of maps, and made the maps submitted by the commission non-binding. The commission then created its suggested maps, the legislature said thank you, threw those maps away, and drew its own.
A lawsuit followed, and about a month ago the Utah Supreme Court unanimously decided that the legislature had acted unconstitutionally by modifying / disregarding the results of the ballot initiative.
A few weeks ago the legislature went into an emergency (ha!) session, and passed a constitutional amendment stating that the legislature has the power to modify citizen ballot initiatives. However, a constitutional amendment requires not just a 2/3 vote of both chambers of the legislature, but also approval by the voters. Consequently, approval of this amendment will be on the ballot in Utah this November.
The ballot language about the amendment - drafted by the Republican leaders of both chambers - was released last week, and is extraordinarily misleading. This is likely to be a very close question, and it will have enormous impact on our state for decades to come.
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