Under Pressure, Independent Panels Produce Mixed Results in Local Redistricting

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

Hurtling toward a Nov. 23 deadline to redraw their district lines, Wisconsin’s largest city and county left no room for error.

The Milwaukee County Board voted Nov. 22 to finalize a new supervisory district map, while the Milwaukee Common Council will vote Nov. 23 on new aldermanic districts.

By contrast, the Dane County Board crossed the finish line with a few days to spare, adopting a final supervisory map for the evening of Nov. 18. And Madison’s Common Council completed its work on both aldermanic districts and voting wards on Nov. 2, well ahead of deadline.

The contrasting timetables reflect the contrasting results of the Badger State’s first experiments with using independent advisory panels to help draw local district lines. Those panels succeeded in Dane County and the Racine Unified School District, but their work ended in rejection and recriminations in Milwaukee and Brown counties.

Continue ReadingUnder Pressure, Independent Panels Produce Mixed Results in Local Redistricting

Wisconsin redistricting panel’s maps could pit dozens of incumbents against each other

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

Nearly half of Wisconsin Assembly members and more than one-third of state senators — including the top Republican leaders in both chambers — would have to run against fellow incumbents if they seek re-election from the districts where they now live, under new maps proposed by an advisory commission.

The People’s Maps Commission plan also would place four of the state’s eight U.S. House members in the same districts as their colleagues, according to an analysis by John D. Johnson, research fellow in the Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education at Marquette Law School.

By contrast, maps proposed by the Legislature’s GOP leadership and by the conservative organization Common Sense Wisconsin would group far fewer incumbents together, Johnson’s analysis shows.

Continue ReadingWisconsin redistricting panel’s maps could pit dozens of incumbents against each other

Stability or “gerrylaundering”? Attorneys clash over using current maps as redistricting baseline

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

In redrawing Wisconsin’s legislative and congressional district lines, politicians and judges face a question that often confronts authors and filmmakers: Whether to produce a sequel or create an entirely new work.

After panning the Republican-drawn 2011 maps as one of the nation’s most extreme partisan gerrymanders, Democrats and progressives find the idea of a sequel as horrifying as another installment of a Halloween slasher-movie franchise. They say it’s time for fresh new districts.

Republicans and conservatives, meanwhile, find comfort in continuing a familiar story — and, not so coincidentally, bringing back almost all of the same characters from previous episodes. They say stability is a virtue in redistricting.

Both sides argue their cases in briefs filed with the Wisconsin Supreme Court, after a legislative debate over a non-binding joint resolution laying out the GOP majority’s favored redistricting principles. The current phase of litigation seeks to define how the justices would redraw the maps if lawmakers can’t reach agreement with Democratic Gov. Tony Evers (and if the task doesn’t wind up in the hands of a three-judge federal court).

Robert Yablon has coined a term for the approach that Wisconsin Republicans advocate: “Gerrylaundering.” That’s also the title of a forthcoming paper for the New York University Law Review, in which Yablon, a University of Wisconsin Law School associate professor, describes how lawmakers try to lock in a prior gerrymander by perfunctorily cleaning up the old maps before clothing the state in them for another decade.

Continue ReadingStability or “gerrylaundering”? Attorneys clash over using current maps as redistricting baseline