A lawsuit filed Wednesday asks Wisconsin’s newly liberal-controlled state Supreme Court to throw out Republican-drawn legislative maps as unconstitutional, the latest legal challenge of many nationwide that could upset political boundary lines before the 2024 election.
Voting districts by Wisconsin law must be contiguous. The current maps have districts separated like two diagonal squares on a cchessboard. That’s illegal and should not have been allowed by the previous conservative majority state Supreme Court.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
MADISON, Wis. (AP) — A lawsuit filed Wednesday asks Wisconsin’s newly liberal-controlled state Supreme Court to throw out Republican-drawn legislative maps as unconstitutional, the latest legal challenge of many nationwide that could upset political boundary lines before the 2024 election.
It comes the day after the Wisconsin Supreme Court flipped from a conservative to liberal majority, with the start of the term of a justice who said that the Republican maps were “rigged” and should be reviewed.
“Despite the fact that our legislative branch is meant to be the most directly representative of the people, the gerrymandered maps have divided our communities, preventing fair representation,” said Jeff Mandell, board president of Law Forward, one of the groups that brought the lawsuit.
Republican Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu said Democrats were “counting on judicial fiat to help them gain power.” He accused them of “coming to collect” from the newly elected liberal Supreme Court justice.
“Today’s filing is great news for our democracy and for the people of our state whose demands for fair maps and a nonpartisan redistricting process have gone repeatedly ignored by their legislators for years,” Evers said in a statement.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good. I’m a conservative Wisconsinite myself, but the state senate acts like they’re royalty, continually ignoring they will of the people and saying that’s what we actually want.
See: Marijuana reform. We have millions, possibly billions in taxes going to other states and state republicans claim the people aren’t ready for it, even though something like 70%+ of the states population is in favor of legalization.
Meanwhile we have almost all of the top 50 counties in the US for alcoholism. But ignore that, weed crime is the real issue apparently.
We need the state congress to accurately represent the people, not this corrupt bs we have now.
Excited for my state to get back on the right track! We’ve still got a ways to go but this is a great first step!
Good. The gross overstepping of power and the shit republicans have pulled in that state is fucking offensive to democracy. Hope this gets passed and WI can get on the right track.
What are some examples of well drawn congressional maps?
Good (left)
Bad (right).
Wow what an amazing graphic, I fully understand the issue with one picture.
It’s a classic infographic which has been floating around the internet for a long time. Hopefully you’re not trolling and did learn something - because more people need to understand the concept.
Because otherwise you end up with districts like this one in Texas which purposely segments the community to alter the votes in one’s favor:
Fun fact about Gerrymandering, it was named after former Massachusetts governor and founding father Elbridge Gerry - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering
You might appreciate the Ugly Gerry font.
Every letter of the alphabet represented by an actual gerrymandered districts outline!
Oh holy hell, hope never seen that before - absolutely insane
I like this graphic but I wish it didn’t use red and blue. I feel like this would be more effective in showing republicans how bad districting hurts everyone if it was green and yellow or orange and purple.
I agree. However, I think most republicans completely understand the implications of political gerrymandering, and embrace it with enthusiastically open arms.
Both bad. A good one has 3 districts going blue, 2 red. Just because something looks clean on a map doesn’t mean good. See video as to why.
You’re not wrong but in the example the “good” one at least respects the majority. That’s the point of the illustration, that a minority can be a majority with bad gerrymandering, and I think the image illustrates that just fine.
The “Blue Wins” District Map is objectively worse than the “Red Wins” Distract Map as it has no politically opposed Districts, effectively silencing 40% of the Precincts. The “Red Wins” Distract Map is certainly skewed but is superior because it doesn’t silence its opposition.
In short what that picture is calling “Good” represents the same dissent silencing behavior that people are rightly mad at Conservatives about. “Fair Representation”, as presented in the article, looks a lot more like “Red Wins” and almost nothing like “Blue Wins”.
You’re objectively stupid.
These may be enjoyable to peruse. Michigan has good maps. Colorado. Just tick Congressional, Sort by state, Final Maps then scroll down and look for graded ones.
https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/redistricting-report-card
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-2022-maps/
I have always wondered what gerrymandering would look like if every district would elect the top two vote getters. Yes, you could make the maps so that one district had 67% Republicans and tell people to evenly vote, but if they didn’t exactly split the dems would get a seat. Push the district up to 75%-80% Republicans to guarantee both seats. At that point, only 20-25% of the voters are not getting represented, unlike the 40-45% under the current system.
Just have no idea how you would change the law to do that.
