Battle over Venue Defines First Phase of Litigation on Wisconsin Redistricting 

This blog post continues the focus of the Law School’s Lubar Center on redistricting.

In the litigation over Wisconsin legislative and congressional redistricting, both sides say they’re not on a venue-shopping spree.

But however it’s characterized, virtually all of the legal action to date has been directed toward deciding which court will hear the case—and perhaps ultimately draw the maps for Wisconsin’s Assembly, state Senate and U.S. House districts—and when.

Officially, the job of redrawing those lines after each decennial census belongs to the Legislature, subject to veto by the governor. But both sides—and even a federal judge—have cast doubt on the chances that Republican legislative leaders and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers will agree on maps. Both sides argue that their preferred courts must be ready to step in swiftly if the legislative process breaks down.

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Wisconsin’s Local Governments Face a Time Crunch in Redrawing Boundaries

This is the first in a series of posts this fall concerning redistricting in Wisconsin—a focus of the Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education. 

In a race against time to draw new district lines for local governments, three of Wisconsin’s four largest counties are off to a slower-than-recommended start—a delay that could throw the state’s three biggest cities behind schedule as well.

Perhaps not coincidentally, those three counties—Milwaukee, Dane, and Brown—are the same ones that have created independent advisory bodies to devise their supervisory district maps. That means they faced the added challenge of inventing a new redistricting process when their timeline was more compressed than ever before.

By contrast, the Waukesha County Board used its traditional process, working through a board committee, and approved a preliminary supervisory district map on September 14, one day ahead of the target date recommended by the Wisconsin Counties Association.

All of the state’s counties and municipalities, along with the Racine Unified School District (RUSD), are under pressure to finish redistricting before December 1, when candidates can begin circulating nomination papers to run in the spring 2022 elections. If any of them miss that deadline, the legal consequences are uncertain.

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