On May 8, 1895, ninety-nine men sat in a courtroom on the fourth floor of the Salt Lake City and County Building. One by one, as a clerk read their names aloud, each man walked forward and signed his name to a document they had spent sixty-six days writing. When the last signature was in place, the president of the assembly, John Henry Smith, looked out at the room and said: "We came together as strangers, no doubt with views diverse in many respects from each other."
That document has governed Utah for 130 years.
The delegates wrote it deliberately to look like every other state constitution of the era, what scholars later called "distinctively undistinctive," an instrument consciously designed to signal that Utah was mainstream America. They borrowed heavily from Illinois, Nevada, Washington, and New York. They divided executive power among a governor, attorney general, and secretary of state, not because that structure best suited Utah, but because suspicion of centralized power was conventional in 1895, and they needed Congress to say yes. They needed Congress badly enough that the entire exercise was shaped by what it would take to gain admission, not by what would best serve the people of the territory.
A 1980 constitutional amendment would later abolish the office of the secretary of state, folding its duties into a newly created lieutenant governor's office. But the underlying impulse, fragmenting executive authority across independently elected officials, remains embedded in the document today.
That framework now governs a state of 3.5 million people in the middle of one of the most contested fights in American direct democracy.
November 1966
The last time anyone seriously tried to reconsider it was November 1966. Calvin Rampton had just won the governorship. The Legislature, after a decade studying the state's antiquated executive structure through the Little Hoover Commission, voted by a two-thirds majority to put a question on the November ballot: Should Utah call a constitutional convention?
The effort had genuine support inside the Capitol. Lawmakers concluded that the existing constitution had grown too tangled for piecemeal repair. Decades of amendments had addressed symptoms without touching the underlying architecture. A convention was meant to do what amendments could not, to look at the whole thing at once.
Voters decided otherwise. About 85 percent said no, and every other constitutional amendment on that same ballot failed alongside the convention question. The margin suggests voters were not weighing specific concerns so much as recoiling from unfamiliarity. A convention opens everything. Delegates could theoretically reach any provision of the existing constitution. Amendments were known. The convention was not. Voters chose the known.
The Legislature created the Constitutional Revision Commission in 1969 to continue the modernization work through narrower channels. The result was the Gateway Amendment of 1970, ratified the following year, which allowed the Legislature to propose sweeping multi-section changes through the amendment process rather than a convention. Controlled. Predictable. And it kept the Legislature in charge of what voters ever got to see.
The convention mechanism has sat dormant since. The Utah Constitution has been amended 134 times. It has never been fundamentally reconsidered.
The Mechanism
Article XXIII, Section 2 of the Utah Constitution states that whenever two-thirds of the members elected to each branch of the Legislature deem it necessary to call a convention to revise or amend the constitution, they shall recommend to electors to vote, at the next general election, for or against a convention. If a majority of all electors voting at that election approve it, the Legislature must provide by law for its calling. The convention must consist of not fewer than the combined number of members in both branches of the Legislature, at least 104 people. Those delegates are chosen directly by voters in their districts. Whatever the convention produces goes back to voters for ratification.
The Legislature cannot block what the delegates produce.
That last sentence is what makes the mechanism different from anything else currently available to Utahns. The amendment process requires the Legislature to propose what goes on the ballot, meaning the Legislature decides which questions the people get to answer. The convention removes that gatekeeping. Delegates chosen for the specific task of reconsidering the document owe nothing to the ongoing legislative agenda. They do their work, return it to the voters, and they are done.
In 1895, the ninety-nine men who signed that document spent sixty-six days on the job. It was their only job. That structure, temporary delegates with a single mandate returning authority to the people, is precisely what Article XXIII preserves. It has simply not been used.
One Door in Midvale
On a Thursday morning in February 2026, two young men knocked on a door in the Union Park neighborhood of Midvale. Riley Beesley, vice chairman of the Utah Federation of College Republicans, was there to gather signatures for a petition to repeal Proposition 4, Utah's anti-gerrymandering law. He had a flyer and a clipboard.
Trent Wilkerson answered. He told Beesley he had received conflicting accounts of what the petition actually did. Beesley told him it would give Utahns a second, more educated opportunity to vote on Prop 4. Wilkerson signed.
Over the following six weeks, Better Boundaries, the nonprofit behind Proposition 4, sent letters to thousands of signers across Senate District 15 urging them to reconsider.
This sequence (sign, learn, reconsider) played out roughly a thousand times in Senate District 15, which covers Midvale, Cottonwood Heights, and parts of West Jordan. It is the clearest illustration available of where Utah's constitutional order currently stands.
The backstory is long. In 2018, Utah voters approved Proposition 4 with 50.3 percent of the vote. The initiative created an independent redistricting commission and prohibited partisan gerrymandering. It was one of three citizen-initiated statutes voters approved that year. The Legislature later amended all three. In 2021, the Legislature gutted Proposition 4 through Senate Bill 200, turning the independent commission into an advisory body that lawmakers could ignore, and then drew congressional maps that split Salt Lake County into four separate districts, carving what would have been a competitive urban seat into four safe Republican districts.
A coalition sued. In July 2024, the Utah Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Legislature had gone too far. The people's constitutional right to reform their government through a ballot initiative is protected. Any legislative attempt to undo a government-reform initiative must meet strict scrutiny.
Senate President Stuart Adams called it the worst court decision of his political career. In a special session that summer, the Legislature put Amendment D on the November 2024 ballot. It would have given lawmakers explicit constitutional authority to repeal or alter any citizen initiative. The courts voided it. The ballot summary was ruled misleading. Constitutional publication requirements had not been met.
"I made some mistakes, and I'll own that," House Speaker Mike Schultz told reporters after the ruling. Adams was more pointed about what came next. "We're not going to give up on that one," he said.
In 2025, the Legislature passed new requirements projected to add more than $1.4 million in publication costs to any future ballot initiative effort. It separately referred a constitutional amendment to the 2026 ballot that would require future tax-related initiatives to earn 60 percent approval rather than a simple majority.
Meanwhile, Judge Dianna Gibson ruled in August 2025 that the Legislature had violated the state constitution by repealing Proposition 4. She voided the 2021 congressional maps and replaced them, turning one of Utah's four congressional districts from a safe Republican seat into a competitive one.
The Utah Republican Party spent $4.35 million gathering signatures to place Proposition 4 on the ballot for repeal. They brought in President Donald Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Turning Point Action. Salt Lake County Clerk Lannie Chapman watched the counter-campaign's removal requests arrive at a scale her office had never seen before. During the prior year's referendum on collective bargaining, she had received twelve requests for signature removal. This time, thousands came.
By late March, nearly 1,000 voters in Senate District 15 had removed their names. The repeal effort fell 259 signatures short of the required threshold in that single district. It will not appear on the November ballot.
The Argument Adams Is Making
Adams is not simply a man consolidating power. He has a genuine argument, and it deserves a fair hearing before it is pushed past.
In January 2025, he told reporters about a conversation with Oregon's Democratic Senate president. Oregon voters had passed a 2020 ballot initiative decriminalizing possession of all hard drugs. The initiative was funded by an organization from New York City. For four years, it produced what the Oregon president described to Adams as chaos, until Oregon's legislature reversed it with bipartisan support in 2024. Oregon became "the Petri dish of America," Adams said. "Every crazy idea in America is passed with an initiative in Oregon."
"Out-of-state companies coming in and running initiatives like that are destroying states," he said. "We have served the people well, and I'm just really concerned that out-of-state groups will come in and spend the money and destroy all that we've done here."
This is not a fringe argument. The initiative process can be and regularly is captured by well-funded outside interests. The Oregon drug decriminalization initiative that Adams cites was funded almost entirely by a New York organization. The Proposition 4 repeal effort that Adams's own party ran in Utah was backed by $4.35 million in professional signature gathering and an endorsement from the president of the United States, which also qualifies as outside influence by almost any definition.
The problem with Adams's position is not that outside money is imaginary. It is that the remedy he keeps reaching for, giving the Legislature unfettered power to undo voter-approved initiatives, concentrates the same kind of power in a different set of hands. The Legislature that repealed Proposition 4 through Senate Bill 200 did not consult the voters of Midvale. It did not hold town halls. It drew maps and presented them as a fait accompli. When voters tried to hold it accountable in court, the Legislature called a special session and sought to amend the constitution to render the court's ruling irrelevant.
"The Supreme Court ruling will destroy Utah," Adams said ahead of the 2026 session. "It's basically changed our entire form of government. We live in a republic."
The court held that the people's right to reform their government is protected by that same constitution. Both things cannot be fully true. The document is not equipped to settle this question cleanly. That is not a flaw in either side's argument. It is a flaw in the document.
What Would Actually Change
A convention would not resolve every dispute. It would create a process in which delegates chosen directly by the people, not by a legislative majority, could address questions the Legislature has no incentive to resolve fairly.
How should the people's right to reform their government through initiatives be balanced against the Legislature's authority to amend laws? What should the relationship be between the governor and an independently elected attorney general who can and does stake out positions at odds with the executive? How should education governance be structured so that accountability for outcomes can actually be located somewhere? The 1895 constitution divided power across multiple elected offices partly to signal mainstream credibility to Congress. That rationale is 130 years old. The divisions remain.
The risks of a convention are real. Any provision of the existing constitution is theoretically open to amendment. Organized interests could shape delegate elections in ways that do not reflect the views of most Utahns. Getting a convention to happen requires moving a Legislature that has shown no interest in distributing power it has spent years consolidating. A two-thirds majority in both chambers would require some Republicans to vote for a process they cannot control. That is a high threshold. It would require sustained, organized public pressure of a kind that does not currently exist.
Which is where the conversation about a constitutional convention has to begin: not in the Legislature, but among Utahns who have watched the redistricting fight, the signature campaigns, the special sessions, and the court rulings, and concluded that the current cycle is not resolving anything.
On Day 27 of the 1895 convention, as delegates debated whether to include women's suffrage in a document they feared might be rejected by Congress, a delegate named Eldredge stood to argue against treating whatever they produced as permanent. "Though it may be a constitution," he said, "and that constitution may be accepted and ratified by the people, it is not to endure for all time; it is subject to improvements and amendments."
He was right about his own document. The ninety-nine men who signed it in that courtroom were doing the best they could with what they knew, under the constraints of what Congress required. They knew future generations would have to do the work they could not.
The question is whether the tools those future generations have are adequate for the problems in front of them. The amendment process is controlled by the Legislature. The initiative process is under coordinated legal and legislative pressure from the same Legislature. The courts have defended the people's rights where the constitution supports them, but courts can only interpret what already exists.
A convention would be something else. Delegates accountable to no ongoing institution, chosen for a single purpose, returning the result to the voters for a final word.
Utah has not seriously asked whether to do that since 1966. Sixty years of accumulated amendments and unresolved structural questions later, the case for asking again is stronger than it has ever been. Whether enough Utahns believe that is a different question. It's the one that matters.
