Court should rein in gerrymandering

Can politicians gerrymander a state so thoroughly that they infringe on the voting rights of opponents?

We think they can — and did in Wisconsin in 2011.

Now the U.S. Supreme Court will decide the question. The court said Monday it would consider a challenge of Republican maps drawn that year. It blocked a lower court requirement that the state develop new maps by Nov. 1. We welcome the court’s decision to take this important case, which could have national implications for American politics.

There is no question maps drawn by Wisconsin Republicans in 2011 were unfair. In the next election, Republicans won only 48.6% of the vote and yet captured 60 of 99 Assembly seats.

But the last time the high court considered the question of partisan redistricting, it couldn’t agree on a test to determine when normal partisanship crossed the line into diluting the votes of opponents. In Viet v. Jubelirer in 2004, Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the majority in deciding against challengers of a Pennsylvania redistricting plan but also said he could imagine how challengers might win in the future if “a state enacts a law that has the purpose and effect of subjecting a group of voters or their party to disfavored treatment.”

In the Wisconsin case, plaintiffs have devised a test to measure the partisanship of a redistricting plan.

The “efficiency gap,” developed by professors at the University of Chicago, measures wasted votes in districts that were either “packed” with like-minded voters into a small number of districts or “cracked” by scattering opponents across districts in numbers too small to matter.

Both parties are guilty of partisan gerrymandering. Six years ago, it was Wisconsin Republicans who tried to lock in an electoral advantage. But a challenge to a plan drawn up by Democrats in Maryland is being heard in the courts, and Illinois Democrats drew districts to their advantage in 2011.

Nonpartisan redistricting should be the goal. In Iowa, a nonpartisan arm of the legislature handles the task, with oversight by lawmakers. In Wisconsin, neither political party has wanted to change the rules. When Democrats controlled both houses of the Legislature and the governor’s office, they showed little interest, and Republican defendants in the current case argue that plaintiffs seek to take “control of districting away from the state legislators to whom the state constitution assigns that task, and hands it to federal judges and opportunistic plaintiffs seeking to accomplish in court what they failed to achieve at the ballot box.” Which, of course, is utter nonsense. Our hope is that the Supreme Court cracks down on partisan redistricting, which has helped to fuel polarization and cynicism.

Partisan redistricting isn’t the only thing wrong with American politics. But it is one thing that we can fix, if we have the will to do so.