WATCH: How pro-democracy activists fought off GOP gerrymandering in Utah
After an eight-year-long legal battle, Utahns have fought off a GOP bid to allow partisan gerrymandering.
Republicans launched a campaign to repeal Proposition 4 – a 2018 voter-backed measure that banned partisan gerrymandering.
Better Boundaries, a pro-democracy group, defeated the repeal campaign and protected Prop 4, by urging voters who had been misled by signature gatherers to remove their names from the petitions to get the GOP measure on the ballot.
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“Don’t underestimate the power of grassroots work. We’ve always been the underdog here,” executive director Elizabeth Rasmussen said. “We’ve had less money, less institutional power than anyone else … but the voters are smart, they know what they want, so just remind them of what they’ve proved and the reasons why and they’ll show up.”
Despite GOP tactics to trick voters into signing petitions for the restrictive voting bill, organizers said the will of the voters won out.
And Rasmussen said the fight isn’t over. Better Boundaries has helped over 10,000 voters remove signatures they were duped into or never provided in the first place.
“We’re still getting requests for people who want their name removed, so as long as that keeps coming in, we’re going to keep doing the work,” Rasmussen said. “As long as there are threats against democratic processes that we believe in, we’ll still be around in fighting for those things.”