Wisconsin counties illustration
The geographic boundaries of Wisconsin’s State Assembly and Senate districts have been called the most anti-democratic case of gerrymandering in the nation. Although party preferences of voters statewide—as demonstrated in recent elections for Governor and U.S. Senator—favor Democrats over Republicans by a 53 to 45 margin, Democrats won only 36% of the 99 Assembly seats, and similarly hold just over one-third of the seats in the State Senate.
Gerrymandering dissipates the Democratic voting strength through deliberate shifting of district boundaries in a process called “packing and cracking.” Packing refers to opportunistically shifting some district boundaries to corral an excess of Democratic voters, ensuring that within that district the Democratic candidate will win far more votes than needed to win that seat, thereby “wasting” the unnecessary votes. Cracking refers to shifting some Democratic voters into majority Republican areas but not enough for the Democratic candidate to win there. Instead, the Republican candidate still wins, albeit by a smaller margin, “wasting” fewer Republican votes and more Democratic votes.
The resulting Republican majorities in both chambers enable them to set the agenda, establish and chair the committees, and control the flow of legislation. The unrepresentative majorities lead to unrepresentative policy: Post-Dobbs reversion to the antiquated 1849 state law on reproductive rights; blocking a referendum to let the voters express their preferences on reproductive law as did the voters in Kansas and Ohio; reducing state funding per student in the UW system to 46th in the nation, including refusal to fund the much-needed Engineering building for the UW-Madison campus; and continuing to reject federal money for railroads and Medicaid, thereby costing Wisconsin taxpayers billions.
Since the April Wisconsin Supreme Court election victory of Judge Janet Protasiewicz, two lawsuits were filed in pursuit of “fair maps.” However, unless fairness is properly defined, and a proper method is implemented to achieve it, Wisconsin may wind up with district boundaries little better than the current rigged array. The fundamental reason is the concentration of Democratic voters in cities, a kind of “natural gerrymandering” that adds to the deliberate gerrymandering.
Achieving Political Fairness
Construction of maps must comply with several requirements. Maps must have districts that are contiguous, compact rather than sprawling; roughly equal population size; and must comply with federal election laws protecting the rights of minority voters. Because of the urban concentration of Democratic voters, these are necessary but not sufficient standards by which to achieve political fairness, however. As carefully argued by Judge Lynn Adelman (“Political Fairness in Redistricting: What Wisconsin’s Experience Teaches,” University of Memphis Law Review, 2019), and by former legislator and re-districting expert Fred Kessler (“How to Draw Fair Maps in Wisconsin,”Capitol Times, Nov. 14, 2020), fairness also requires that state-level decision-making in the legislature reflect state-level voter preferences as revealed in state-wide elections for governor and U.S. Senator. So, if Dems are earning 53 percent of the vote in state-wide elections, a fair map of district boundaries would provide a 50/50 chance of winning 53 percent of the state legislature’s seats as well.
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Enter District Solutions, LLC
This additional fairness criterion is inherently quantitative. As Matthew Petering, Professor of Engineering and President of District Solutions LLC, explains, his algorithm can construct maps that answer the fairness question. First, maps for both the Assembly and the Senate districts can be drawn to provide proportional representation, despite the geographic concentration of the Democratic voters.
Second, the District Solutions algorithm can accommodate special cases, such as established districts for protected classes under federal law. In other words, the algorithm can be programmed to preserve hard-won districts representing Blacks and Latinos, while proceeding to redraw the other districts around the state.
Third, the District Solutions algorithm can construct maps on the basis of the usual requirements plus proportional representation. Its maps project a fair outcome with Democrats having a 50-50 chance of earning a majority in either chamber, or both, in proportion to the statewide vote. Moreover, the algorithm can rate other maps on the basis of the fairness standard, as well as any of the other necessary requirements. For instance, the District Solutions algorithm analyzed the map proposed by the Wisconsin Senate Democrats in November 2021, and projects that map would provide the Democrats with just a 1.7% chance of winning a majority in the Assembly and an 18.9% chance of a majority in the state Senate.
Fourth, District Solutions LLC provides quantitative demonstration of the political and legal conclusion of Kessler and Adelman: because Democratic voters are more clustered in cities than the more widely dispersed Republican voters, any construction of fair maps must include the use of data on where voters live. Without residency data from recent state-wide elections, the algorithm cannot be calibrated to construct maps that produce proportional representation for voters of both parties. In their simulation without using voter data, District Solutions shows that, despite winning roughly 53% of the statewide vote, the most likely outcome for Democratic voters would be to win about 45% of the seats with very low likelihood of a majority in either chamber. While that is better than the current allocation of 36% of seats, it falls well short of fair.
The use of voter data is not partisan; it is the failure to use voter data that results in partisan bias. Proceeding without such data would yield maps biased in favor of Republicans and would preserve most of the imbalance now built into the current array of maps. This is the undemocratic case in neighboring Iowa, a state whose procedure our Assembly Speaker Robin Vos is proposing for Wisconsin.
