Our Student Contributor for November is 3L Nicholas Bergosh. Nicholas is from Pensacola, Florida, but was born in San Diego, California, and spent a significant part of his life there. He is interested in business law, but also wants to continue working with a sports agency. He is a sailor in the United States Naval Reserves and plans to reenlist after his contract ends in 2023. Welcome Nicholas!
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.
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.