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| Judges Find Redistricting Unfairly Favored Republicans | Judges Find Redistricting Unfairly Favored Republicans |
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| A panel of three federal judges said Monday that the Wisconsin Legislature’s 2011 redrawing of State Assembly districts to favor Republicans was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, the first such ruling in three decades of pitched legal battles over the issue. | A panel of three federal judges said Monday that the Wisconsin Legislature’s 2011 redrawing of State Assembly districts to favor Republicans was an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, the first such ruling in three decades of pitched legal battles over the issue. |
| Federal courts have struck down gerrymanders on racial grounds, but not on the grounds that they unfairly advantage a political party — the more common form of gerrymandering. The case could now go directly to the Supreme Court, where its fate may rest with a single justice, Anthony Kennedy, who has expressed a willingness to strike down partisan gerrymanders, but has yet to accept a rationale for it. | Federal courts have struck down gerrymanders on racial grounds, but not on the grounds that they unfairly advantage a political party — the more common form of gerrymandering. The case could now go directly to the Supreme Court, where its fate may rest with a single justice, Anthony Kennedy, who has expressed a willingness to strike down partisan gerrymanders, but has yet to accept a rationale for it. |
| Should the court affirm the ruling, it could upend the next round of state redistricting, in 2021, for congressional and state elections nationwide, most of which is likely to be conducted by Republican-controlled legislatures that have swept into power in recent years. | |
| “It is a huge deal,” said Heather Gerken, a professor of law and expert on redistricting at Yale Law School. “For years, everyone has waited for the Supreme Court to do something on this front. Now one of the lower courts has jump-started the debate. | |
| “If this were to be a nationwide standard, 2021 would look quite different,” she said, “especially for the Democrats.” | |
| Several election-law scholars said the ruling was especially significant because it offered, for the first time, a clear mathematical formula for measuring partisanship in a district, something that had been missing in previous assaults on gerrymandering. | |
| The 2-to-1 ruling by the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin said that the Legislature’s remapping violated both the First Amendment and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment because it aimed to deprive Democratic voters of their right to be represented. | |
| “Although Wisconsin’s natural political geography plays some role in the apportionment process,” the court wrote, “it simply does not explain adequately the sizable disparate effect” of Republican gains in the State Assembly after the boundaries were redrawn. | |
| The two judges who ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, Kenneth Ripple and Barbara Crabb, were nominated to the bench by Presidents Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, respectively. Judge William Griesbach, who was nominated by President George W. Bush, dissented. | |
| The boundaries of both federal and state legislative districts are redrawn every 10 years after the census to ensure that each district contains roughly the same number of people, a standard the Supreme Court set with its one person one vote ruling in 1962. | |
| But both Republican and Democratic majorities in statehouses often remap districts to favor themselves, either by cramming opposition voters into a single district, or dividing them among districts so that they have no majority anywhere, tactics called “packing and cracking.” | |
| Courts generally have agreed that some partisan advantage in redistricting is tolerable, in part because voters themselves are not spread equally across a state or district by party. But the plaintiffs in the case, 12 state Democrats represented by the Campaign Legal Center, had argued that the Wisconsin remapping was among the most sharply partisan in the nation. | |
| In 2012 elections for the Assembly, Wisconsin Republicans won 48.6 percent of the two-party vote, but took 61 percent of the 99 Assembly seats. |