## Facts

- Jordan School District in Salt Lake County, Utah, was a large public school district serving multiple municipalities.
- Utah law provided three methods to create a new school district from an existing one: (1) citizen initiative petition, (2) request by the existing or proposed district board, and (3) request by a city or group of cities within the existing district.
- Under methods (1) and (2), the detachment proposal was submitted to all voters in the existing district; under method (3), the proposal was submitted only to voters residing in the territory of the proposed new district.
- In 2007, several cities used the city-initiated method to detach and form a new school district, limiting the electorate to residents within the proposed district boundaries.
- The City of Herriman and individual residents who lived within Jordan School District but outside the proposed new district were excluded from voting.
- Plaintiffs alleged they had substantial interests affected by detachment (including tax base, funding, and governance) and that exclusion from the election violated the Equal Protection Clause.

## Issues

1. Whether excluding residents of the existing school district who live outside the proposed new district from a city-initiated detachment election violates the Equal Protection Clause.
2. Whether the voting limitation should be reviewed under strict scrutiny (as a burden on a fundamental right) or rational-basis review (as a geographic/structural allocation of local decisionmaking).
3. Whether, under the appropriate standard of review, the statutory scheme is constitutionally justified by legitimate state interests.

## Decision

- The Tenth Circuit affirmed summary judgment for the defendants and upheld the statute.
- The court applied rational-basis review, rejecting strict scrutiny.
- The court held the state’s decision to confine the franchise to residents of the proposed new district was rationally related to legitimate governmental purposes, including local control and coherent structuring of political subdivisions.
- The court concluded the geographic classification was not invidious and did not involve a suspect class or an unconstitutional denial of voting rights.

## Legal Principles

- Not every exclusion from participation in a particular local election triggers strict scrutiny; heightened review generally applies when the state denies or dilutes the vote within an established electoral unit along impermissible lines.
- States have broad authority to structure political subdivisions and to allocate decisionmaking among local governmental units, including defining the electorate by territorial boundaries, absent invidious discrimination.
- Geographic voter-eligibility classifications tied to the boundaries of a proposed political entity typically receive rational-basis review when they reflect legislative choices about local governance structure.
- Under rational-basis review, a classification is valid if it bears a rational relationship to legitimate state interests; the state need not adopt the most inclusive or best policy option.

## Conclusion

The Tenth Circuit held that Utah could constitutionally limit voting in a city-initiated school-district detachment election to residents of the proposed new district because the rule was a geographic, structural decision about local governance subject to rational-basis review and supported by legitimate state interests.


City of Herriman v. Bell, 590 F.3d 1176 (10th Cir. 2010)