Wisconsin Kangaroos Are Hopping Mad Over Gerrymandering Case
The fact that the election maps in Wisconsin are severely gerrymandered to heavily favor Republicans has been well known for over a decade. Even though Democrats earned 53% of the vote for Assembly races in 2018, they won only 36% of the districts. Then, when you thought it couldn't get worse, it did:
The current maps were instituted by the Supreme Court in 2022, which was then under a 4-3 conservative majority, after the Republican-held Legislature and Gov. Tony Evers were unable to reach a compromise on new maps. The conservative majority ruled in a series of decisions in Johnson v. Wisconsin Elections Commission that any proposed new maps must comply with a standard of “least change” from the gerrymandered 2011 maps. After the legal wrangling ended, the Court chose the exact maps that had been initially proposed by the Legislature, which closely followed the lines of the previous gerrymandered maps, although they had been vetoed by the governor.
After that debacle, the Republicans managed to achieve supermajorities in both houses despite not winning the majority of votes cast.