Challengers seeking fairer election districts

districts and Democrats seven out of eight in Maryland.

As the Supreme Court prepares to hear a landmark challenge to Wisconsin’s partisan gerrymandering in October, opponents of the process in other states are waging legal and constitutional battles that also could reach the nation’s highest court.

“We’ve been subjugated into irrelevancy,” DeWolf says of the conservative residents of western Maryland, who elected an even more conservative member of Congress for 20 years until the lines were redrawn after the 2010 Census. “All of a sudden, the rules were changed.”

A three-judge panel declined in a 2-1 decision Thursday to enter a preliminary injunction declaring the Maryland district unconstitutional. The court also put further proceedings on hold pending the outcome of the Supreme Court case. Lawyers for the challengers said they would appeal the lower court decision to the high court.

MAJORITY MAKES THE RULES

Every 10 years in most states, the rules for drawing district lines for Congress and state legislatures are changed by the party or parties in power. If that power is shared — or, in a few states including California, if the process is governed by a commission — the lines might be drawn fairly. More often, one-party rule leads to partisan advantage.

The Supreme Court has ruled on multiple occasions that race cannot be a major factor in the way lines are drawn, but it has yet to set a standard for how much politics is too much.

“The Supreme Court hasn’t really even defined what gerrymandering is,” says Michael Li, a redistricting expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

Two years ago, however, a narrow majority of justices ruled that states can try to remove partisan politics from the process by creating commissions to take the job away from legislators.

In those legislators’ hands, software programs have perfected the art of line-drawing for partisan advantage. Republicans, in particular, seized on the process in 2012 after gaining nearly 700 seats in legislatures two years earlier, which gave them control of both houses in 25 states.

Wisconsin is one of several battleground states in which Republicans and Democrats fought to a virtual draw in last year’s presidential election. But because Republicans control the legislature, they designed election districts in 2012 that have given them a nearly 2-to-1 advantage in the state Assembly ever since.

A federal district court ruled 2-1 last year that those districts discriminated against Democrat- ic voters “by impeding their ability to translate their votes into legislative seats.” It demanded that the legislature draw new district lines by this November, but the Supreme Court blocked that requirement while it considers the state’s appeal. Oral argument in the case is set for Oct. 3. Fueling challengers’ hopes is the existence of several datadriven models to measure election results against other factors. One of them — the “efficiency gap” — counts the number of “wasted” votes for winning candidates in districts packed with the opposition party’s voters, as well as for losing candidates in districts where opposition party voters were scattered.

FAR-REACHING IMPACT

Several other states could be affected by the outcome of the Wisconsin case:

uLawsuits are on hold in North Carolina, where the Supreme Court has struck down some congressional and state legislative districts because of their reliance on racial demographics. The state’s congressional delegation includes 10 Republicans and just three Democrats.

uOhio voters approved a con- stitutional amendment in 2015 to reduce gerrymandering of state legislative districts. Another one focusing on the state’s 12-4 GOP tilt in Congress could reach the ballot next year. The state’s Democratic Party chairman has threatened a lawsuit if the Supreme Court strikes down Wisconsin’s districts.

uMichigan activists are pursuing a ballot initiative to create a non-partisan redistricting commission for both congressional and legislative districts. The former state Democratic chairman plans to sue over maps that have helped Republicans win nine of 14 congressional seats.

The results of the artistic partisanship are plain to see. In 2012, after the most recent Census, Republicans won 53% of the vote but 72% of the House seats in states where they drew the lines. Democrats won 56% of the vote but 71% of the seats where they controlled the process.

“No matter who is doing the gerrymandering, it’s bad for democracy,” says Mimi McKenzie, legal director for The Public Interest Law Center in Philadelphia. “It’s bad when Democrats do it, it’s bad when Republicans do it.”

“No matter who is doing the gerrymandering, it’s bad for democracy.” Mimi McKenzie, legal director, The Public Interest Law Center in Philadelphia