When the courts decide state legislative maps, we all lose
Last month, the Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out state legislative maps drawn by Republican legislators in 2021, forcing new maps to be created and used for the 2024 election. Democrats praised the decision, while Republicans called it a political move by the courts.
Both Democrats and Republicans are misguided in how they interpreted the ruling. Indeed, battles won with court rulings like this are simultaneously contributing to the war to protect democracy being lost.
The court claimed that the current map was unconstitutional, since the districts were not contiguous (meaning that the areas within each district are not connected). By the letter of definition, this is correct. Yet it represents a convenient red herring for a newfound Democrat majority on the Supreme Court to impose their will and demand that a new map be drawn.
The situation for mapping districts in Wisconsin is challenging. Wisconsin is a near 50-50 state between Democrat and Republican voters. Yet the state House and Senate maps, as well as the congressional map, all give Republicans majorities in these chambers. For example, the State Senate currently has a 22-11 Republican supermajority, while the GOP’s 64-35 majority in the State Assembly essentially gives them unlimited power. The only headwind they face is the Democratic governor, Tony Evers.
The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gave all these maps a failing grade based on partisan fairness, a measure that captures the degree by which maps are skewed to give an advantage to a given party. The election results in 2022 confirmed such partisan bias.
The situation in Wisconsin exposes the flaw in using discrete units like districts, rather than the popular vote, to determine representation.
The challenge that Democrats have traditionally faced across the nation is that their voters tend to be clustered in urban areas, while Republican voters are dispersed across larger rural areas. This makes it easier to pack Democrat voters into districts that they easily win, while strategically allocating Republican voters across multiple districts that lead to more seats won. The net effect is greater representation with minimal popular vote support.
Such mapping efforts represent gerrymandering at its best, and its worst. Republican legislators across the country have used it to their advantage for decades.
But Democrats have become better at the process in recent years. The state of Illinois is the poster child for Democrat gerrymandering.
Winning the state with 58 percent of the popular vote, the Democrat-controlled legislature gerrymandered its congressional districts to give its party 14 of the state’s 17 seats in 2022. Democrats also won a 40-19 majority in the State Senate and a 78-39 majority in the State House of Representatives. By design, voters did not need to show up to vote, with the outcomes largely preordained.
Some would argue that the only way to counter Republican gerrymandering is with Democrat gerrymandering. Yet two wrongs do not make the situation right for the people that matter the most: the voters.
The ideal solution is constitutional reform that uses the popular vote to determine representation. But the likelihood of this occurring any time soon is close to zero, given that the very people who benefit from the current district mapping system are the same people who would need to support such changes.
An alternative solution is to use independent commissions to draw maps, with some of the members coming from outside the state. Moreover, to assemble such a commission, each party would provide a list of possible people to serve, with Democrats selecting the people on the commission from the Republican list and Republicans selecting the people from the Democrat list. This employs a type of “you cut, I choose” strategy that ultimately forces each party to propose centrist members who are more likely to compromise.
Any proposed maps must also be scored against standard measures of gerrymandering, like efficiency gaps, mean-median difference and partisan symmetry. No one of these measures alone is sufficient, yet collectively, they provide a bright light to expose gerrymandering and its associated egregiousness.
The most important takeaway from the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling is that any time the courts must validate or reject a map, voters are being shortchanged and disrespected. Given the growth in court cases in process to assess political maps, what was needed to create our nation in the late 18th century is no longer necessary, appropriate or optimal today.
The time for constitutional change has arrived. Voters deserve better.
Sheldon H. Jacobson, Ph.D., is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He applies his expertise in data-driven risk-based decision-making to evaluate and inform public policy. He serves as the director of the Institute for Computational Redistricting.