Lubar Center – Page 15 – Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog

Scholars advocate groundbreaking use of technology in Wisconsin redistricting cases

Post author:Larry Sandler
Post published:October 28, 2021
Post category:Election Law Lubar Center Public

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

Wisconsin could be one of the first states in the nation to draw legislative and congressional maps with powerful computer technology originally developed to expose gerrymandering, under an approach being advocated in state and federal courts.

Two overlapping groups of number-crunchers, mostly professors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Marquette University, are urging judges to let them use the technology to create districts that would improve representation for people of color.

One group, calling itself the Citizen Mathematicians and Scientists, has been admitted as intervenors in the redistricting case before the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The other group, dubbed the Citizen Data Scientists, has been denied intervenor status in related litigation before a three-judge federal panel, but will be allowed to file friend-of-the-court briefs in that case.

In both cases, the groups’ members represent themselves as nonpartisan researchers. But two of them, and several of their attorneys, have previous ties to Democratic and progressive interests in high-profile litigation around redistricting and other political disputes.

The technology that they are advocating uses high-speed computers to create an “ensemble” of hundreds or even thousands of possible maps for comparative analysis. Its evolutionary path starts with former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and winds through Wisconsin.

Battle over Venue Defines First Phase of Litigation on Wisconsin Redistricting

Post author:Larry Sandler
Post published:October 14, 2021
Post category:Election Law Lubar Center Political Processes & Rhetoric Public

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.

Gerrymandering, geography, and competitiveness

Post author:John Johnson
Post published:October 8, 2021
Post category:Lubar Center Public

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

Many discussions of “gerrymandering” are hampered by an often unacknowledged tension between competing goals. Gerrymandering is classically defined as weirdly-drawn districts manipulated from some ideal (or “natural”) form so as to benefit a particular party or politician. In practice, people see evidence of gerrymandering when one party consistently wins a share of legislative districts in excess of its proportion of the overall vote.

Proponents of “fair maps” may be motivated by concern over a partisan imbalance, but they typically define “fairness” with regard to the first definition of gerrymandering. A fair map is one drawn without regard to political advantage. Instead, districts should follow the boundaries of existing communities where possible.

There’s the rub. Imagine if Wisconsin’s Constitution called for our decennial redistricting to be carried out by an alien species of mapmaking specialists who are unaware of the existence of Democrats or Republicans but are nonetheless imbued with a passion for compactness, contiguity, and the preservation of municipal boundaries. These extraterrestrial cartographers could provide us with thousands of maps to choose from, but probably every last one of them would still give Republicans a legislative majority when the statewide vote was a tie. The reason, as we shall see, is where partisans live and how they cluster together.