On one thing, Jay Heck and Joe Handrick agreed: They each respect the other for doing what each thinks is best for Wisconsin voters.

But during an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program, posted on Marquette Law School’s web site on Tuesday (Oct. 26, 2021), the two disagreed on just about everything that involved policies and practices involving voters. That included differences on a list of issues related to elections, especially the hot current disputes over how to draw new boundaries for political districts.

Heck has led Common Cause Wisconsin, a non-profit organization based in Madison, for more than 20 years. Handrick, a former Republican legislator from northern Wisconsin, was recently named to head Common Sense Wisconsin, also a non-profit organization.

Their differences can be summarized by noting that Handrick helped draw up the Republican-backed 2011 map of legislative districts in Wisconsin and Heck called that map one of the five most partisan gerrymanders in the last 50 years of American politics.

Or it can be shown in the way Heck spoke positively of the work of a citizen’s commission, appointed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, which recently proposed “nonpartisan” maps for legislative districts for the next decade, while Handrick sharply criticized that commission’s proposal and spoke positively of maps proposed by Republicans in the state legislature.

You can feel the “gravitational pull” of the political forces that are trying to make it harder for people to vote, Marquette Law School Professor Atiba Ellis said during a recent “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” program. He and Molly McGrath, a voting rights attorney, advocate, and organizer for the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights project, called for resisting that pull through broad efforts to make voting accessible and easy for the maximum number of people.

Rick Esenberg, president and general counsel for the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), also can be seen as someone with a strong sense of gravity around voting issues. But the pull he feels leads him and the influential conservative law firm and think tank he heads to take positions that differ with those of Ellis and McGrath. In a separate “On the Issues” program recently, Esenberg described WILL’s work on a range of issues, including on voting issues. The pull Esenberg described was toward observing the law and judicial decisions in ways that likely would put more limits on ways to vote.

The pair of programs, conducted virtually and posted on the Marquette Law School web site, continued the “On the Issues” focus on voting issues. The programs are hosted by Gousha, the Law School’s distinguished fellow in law and public policy.