An important new redistricting lawsuit in Wisconsin just cleared a major
hurdle by surviving a motion for summary judgment and will now head to
trial. The suit raises an argument that has been made many times before
but without success: that election districts were drawn with the
improper aim of maximizing one side's partisan advantage. In this case,
the plaintiffs, a group of Democrats, have alleged that Wisconsin
Republicans unfairly gerrymandered the state's legislative maps to
benefit the wingnuts.Every such case in the past that has made similar claims has ultimately
failed because the Supreme Court (or more specifically, Justice Anthony
Kennedy) has ruled that there's no manageable standard for judging when a
partisan gerrymander is impermissible. But here, plaintiffs are relying
on a new metric known as the "efficiency gap," a very compelling
approach its creators describe thusly:
The efficiency gap is simply the difference between the parties’
respective wasted votes in an election, divided by the total number of
votes cast. Wasted votes are ballots that don’t contribute to victory
for candidates, and they come in two forms: lost votes cast for
candidates who are defeated, and surplus votes cast for winning
candidates but in excess of what they needed to prevail. When a party
gerrymanders a state, it tries to maximize the wasted votes for the
opposing party while minimizing its own, thus producing a large
efficiency gap. In a state with perfect partisan symmetry, both parties
would have the same number of wasted votes.
Put moreconcretely, every time a Republican legislator or member of
Congress wins with 55 percent of the vote but a Democrat in the same
state wins with 85 percent, far more votes are "wasted" on behalf of the
Democrat—exactly what Republican cartographers want, and exactly what
they’ve achieved in Wisconsin, where the GOP holds 62 percent of seats
in the legislature even though Barack Obama carried the state twice.
Unlike other proposals, this test can be rigorously and empirically
applied to any map, and now plaintiffs will have the chance to make
their case in court. And should this dispute eventually reach the
Supreme Court, it's quite possible that Justice Kennedy will finally
find that the efficiency gap is a partisan gerrymandering standard he
can love. But even if he doesn't, if a fifth liberal justice joins the
court and finds this approach workable, it'll be a whole new day in
redistricting jurisprudence, and a massive flood of lawsuits will
follow.
An important new redistricting lawsuit in Wisconsin just cleared a major
hurdle by surviving a motion for summary judgment and will now head to
trial. The suit raises an argument that has been made many times before
but without success: that election districts were drawn with the
improper aim of maximizing one side's partisan advantage. In this case,
the plaintiffs, a group of Democrats, have alleged that Wisconsin
Republicans unfairly gerrymandered the state's legislative maps to
benefit the wingnuts.Every such case in the past that has made similar claims has ultimately
failed because the Supreme Court (or more specifically, Justice Anthony
Kennedy) has ruled that there's no manageable standard for judging when a
partisan gerrymander is impermissible. But here, plaintiffs are relying
on a new metric known as the "efficiency gap," a very compelling
approach its creators describe thusly:
No comments:
Post a Comment