Redistricting Consultants Rule Out Legislative Boundary Plans

Saturday, February 3rd, 2024 -- 7:36 AM

Two redistricting consultants hired by the Wisconsin Supreme Court to analyze proposals for new legislative boundaries in Wisconsin ruled out two plans submitted by Republican lawmakers and a conservative law firm and declared the remaining four submitted by liberal groups, university professors and Democrats "indistinguishable" from each other.

The consultants' analysis, submitted to the court late Thursday as part of an order by the court to draw new legislative maps in Wisconsin, described the Republican plans as "partisan gerrymanders" but did not explicitly recommend to justices to accept the Democratic plans either. The report submitted Thursday is the latest development in a lawsuit seeking to overturn the state Legislature's current boundaries, which have helped Republicans secure comfortable majorities for more than a decade. The consultants, Bernard Grofman of the University of California, Irvine and Jonathan Carvas of Carnegie Mellon University, told the justices they could draw a map for the court by taking one or all of the Democratic map plans and improve upon them. "If the court were to instruct us to create such a map, we are poised to produce it quickly," they wrote in a report filed with the court late Thursday.

The consultants filed the report evaluating each of the map proposals based on the court's criteria, such as population equality, contiguous territory and "partisan impact." Under consideration were submissions from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, Republican legislative leaders, Democratic lawmakers, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professors, the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and the petitioners who brought the lawsuit who are represented by Law Forward, a liberal legal firm. The consultants concluded the GOP leaders' plan did not warrant further consideration and described the plan put forward by WILL as scoring well on "good government" criteria but having an "extreme level of partisan bias," dubbing it a "stealth gerrymander."

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