Utah

Republicans hold a 61-14 majority in the House and 23-6 in the Senate. They hold every statewide office. Governor Spencer Cox, now in his second and final term, occasionally vetoes his own party’s bills but signs most of them. The legislature has a veto-proof supermajority in both chambers.

Utah voters have tried to reform their government three times through ballot initiatives. The legislature overrode all three.

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Voters keep passing laws the legislature keeps gutting

In 2018, Utah voters approved three ballot initiatives. Proposition 3 expanded Medicaid to adults under 138% of the federal poverty line. Proposition 2 legalized medical marijuana. Proposition 4 created an independent redistricting commission. All three passed with majority support.

The legislature repealed and replaced every one of them.

In 2024, the legislature tried again with Amendment D, a constitutional amendment that would have given lawmakers explicit power to repeal any voter-approved initiative, past or future. The Utah Supreme Court unanimously ruled the ballot language “deceptive” and voided it before the election.

Now the legislature has referred a new constitutional amendment to the November 2026 ballot. It would require a 60% supermajority for any citizen initiative that increases or expands taxes. The state Senate approved it 21-8, with every yes vote from a Republican.

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Utah leads the nation in banned books

Thirty-four books are now prohibited in every Utah public school. Fifteen were added in 2026 alone, nearly as many as the previous two years combined.

34 books banned statewide in Utah public schools, the most of any state

The bans flow from HB 29, signed in 2024. The law triggers a statewide ban when three school districts or two districts plus five charter schools flag a book as “objective sensitive material.” No state review panel evaluates the book’s literary or educational value. The threshold is volume of complaints, not quality of objections.

The workload has exhausted even Republican lawmakers. Sen. Mike McKell, a Republican from Spanish Fork, proposed oversight policies for how schools select, remove, and maintain library collections. Some Republican legislators have publicly opposed adding more rules, citing fatigue with the constant changes.

Meanwhile, the 2026 session introduced HB 517, which would tighten standards for instructional content beyond library books, extending restrictions into classroom materials.

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The Great Salt Lake is between critical and collapse

The lake ended the 2025 water year at its third-lowest level on record. It is 36.1% full. Scientists at BYU say it needs an additional one million acre-feet of water per year to reverse its decline, which would require cutting water consumption in the watershed by a third to a half.

Then a 40,000-acre AI data center arrived. The Stratos Project, backed by investor Kevin O’Leary, won approval from the Box Elder County Commission on May 4, 2026, over the chants of more than a thousand protesters. The facility would consume an estimated 16.6 billion gallons of water per year and 9 gigawatts of power, more than double the entire state’s current electricity consumption.

Nearly 4,000 Utahns filed protests with the Division of Water Rights against the project’s application for water from a direct tributary of the Great Salt Lake. The application was withdrawn on May 7. The developer has since scaled back to a Phase I proposal of 1.5 gigawatts on less than 2,000 acres, with no reduction to water flowing to the lake.

Governor Cox called the project’s rollout “not good” but defended it as important to national security in an AI competition with China.

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Transgender rights are being stripped layer by layer

Utah’s Movement Advancement Project equality rating dropped to “Low” in 2025. The legislature has passed a new restriction in every session since 2023, each one broader than the last.

Year	Law	What it does
2023	SB 16	Banned transgender girls from girls’ sports teams in public schools
2023	SB 93	Moratorium on new prescriptions for gender-affirming hormones for minors
2025	HB 269	Banned transgender college students from sex-aligned dorm rooms
2025	—	Banned LGBTQ pride flags in all public schools and government buildings
2026	HB 174	Full ban on gender-affirming medical care for minors, passed 54-15

HB 174 converts the 2023 moratorium into a permanent ban and requires doctors treating transgender teenagers to stop writing prescriptions by January 28, 2027. The legislature commissioned its own study on care for transgender youth, then ignored the results when the findings did not support a ban.

One bill went too far even for this legislature. HB 183 would have stripped transgender Utahns from the state’s housing and employment nondiscrimination protections and banned them from jobs involving minors. It was gutted in committee and failed to advance in the Senate.

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A judge drew the map the legislature refused to draw

In 2018, voters passed Proposition 4 to create an independent redistricting commission. The legislature passed SB 200, made the commission advisory, and removed the ban on partisan gerrymandering. In 2021, the supermajority Republican legislature ignored every map the commission produced and drew its own, splitting Salt Lake County across all four congressional districts.

The Utah League of Women Voters and Mormon Women for Ethical Government sued. In July 2024, the Utah Supreme Court unanimously ruled that voter-approved reform initiatives carry special constitutional protection and that the legislature’s override must survive strict scrutiny.

71% of Utah voters support Bears Ears National Monument, but voters have even less power over their own congressional maps

In August 2025, Judge Dianna Gibson ruled the legislature’s maps unconstitutional and ordered new ones. In November, she adopted the plaintiffs’ remedial map, creating three Republican-leaning districts and one Democratic-leaning district centered on Salt Lake County. The Utah Supreme Court rejected the legislature’s appeal in February 2026.

The legislature responded by passing HB 392, which creates a three-judge “constitutional court” designed to transfer the redistricting case away from Judge Gibson. Two sitting U.S. representatives, Burgess Owens and Celeste Maloy, filed a federal lawsuit to overturn the court-ordered map.

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Protect yourself right now

1. Check your voter registration. The June 23 primary is the first election under court-ordered congressional maps. Verify your status at vote.utah.gov. Registration deadline for the primary is June 9.

2. Know what is on your November ballot. A constitutional amendment would require 60% approval for any citizen initiative that raises taxes. If it passes, future Medicaid-style ballot measures become nearly impossible. Read the full text before you vote.

3. Attend a school board meeting. Book ban challenges start at the district level. Three districts flagging the same book triggers a statewide ban. Your board’s decisions affect every student in the state.

4. File a water rights protest. The Stratos data center withdrew its initial application, but Phase I is still moving forward. Watch for new filings at the Utah Division of Water Rights and file public comment when they appear.

5. Call your state legislator. The legislature returns in January 2027. Ask whether they will vote to raise the bar on citizen initiatives, and whether they plan to comply with the court-ordered redistricting map. The Capitol switchboard is 801-538-1029.