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.

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.