- A federal judge has ordered San Juan County, Utah to redraw the boundaries of its county commissioner voting districts.
A federal judge has ordered San Juan County, Utah, to redraw the boundaries of its county-commission districts in a way that could make it easier for Navajos to attain two of the commission’s three seats. On February 19th, U.S. District Judge Robert Shelby issued a decision and order granting the tribe’s motion for summary judgment in one part of a complex lawsuit. Since 1987 the commission has always had one Navajo and two Anglo members. San Juan County is the only county in Utah that does not elect commissioners through at-large voting. That is the result of litigation in the 1980s that ended with a consent decree between the county and the Navajo Nation that included the adoption of so-called “single-member” voting and the establishment of District 3 as majority-Navajo. Since then, the commissioners have never redrawn that district even as the county’s population changed, saying they did not believe they were allowed to. However, Shelby ruled that nothing in the consent decree prevented them from redistricting and noted that they changed the boundaries of the two other districts in 2011. The county’s overall population is about half Anglo, half Native, but District 3 is more than 90 percent Navajo while the two other districts are about 30 percent. Shelby concluded that District 3 is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause.
