A day after Wisconsin supreme court justice Janet Protasiewicz took office, flipping control of the court to liberals, a coalition of legal groups in Wisconsin has filed suit to challenge the state’s electoral maps. It alleges that the state’s maps are gerrymandered and unconstitutional and aims to correct the partisan advantage Republican lawmakers have maintained in Wisconsin’s electoral maps for more than a decade.
The complaint alleges that Wisconsin’s maps deny voters “equal protection and free association” rights and violate Wisconsin’s constitution, which calls for districts to consist of contiguous geographical territory.
The lawsuit, filed at the state supreme court, asks the state to redraw the electoral maps for the state senate and assembly before the 2024 elections. The case also requests that state senators not up for reelection face a special election in 2024 after new maps have been drawn.
If the court rules that Wisconsin’s maps are unconstitutional, Law Forward, a left-leaning law firm and one of the groups filing the lawsuit, “would be willing” to propose new maps, said Jeff Mandell, the group’s founder.
States are tasked with redrawing their electoral maps every 10 years. In Wisconsin, the state legislature is responsible for drawing the legislative lines that shape political control of the state.
In 2011, Republican lawmakers gathered behind the closed doors of a Madison law firm across the street from the state capitol, redrawing the state’s electoral maps and shifting millions of voters into new districts. The resulting maps, which were quickly signed into law by the former Republican governor Scott Walker, nearly guaranteed Republican majorities in both chambers of the state legislature.
“In 2011, the legislature engaged in the most extreme version of gerrymandering that we possibly have ever seen,” said Mark Gaber, who manages redistricting litigation with Campaign Legal Center, one of the organizations signing onto the complaint. “The 2011 Republican legislature ensured that Wisconsin voters would never be able to change their minds.”
A decade later, on 15 April 2022, the Wisconsin supreme court ruled in a 4-3 decision to adopt Republican lawmakers’ new maps, which further entrenched the party’s advantage in the state.
In statewide contests, Wisconsin elections are typically competitive – the Democratic governor, Tony Evers, won the 2018 gubernatorial election by 1.1 percentage points, and was re-elected in 2022 by 3.4 percentage points. Presidential contests have been decided by similarly narrow margins in the last decade. In the state assembly and senate, though, Republicans have maintained large majorities since 2011. Currently, Republicans hold a majority in the assembly and a supermajority in the state senate.
The legal groups filed the lawsuit on behalf of 19 voters, among them Denise Sweet, an Anishinaabe poet and Native Vote Manager with Wisconsin Conservation Voters, and Rebecca Clarke, a county supervisor from Sheboygan county. They argue that Wisconsin’s maps deprive their communities and constituencies of representation in the state legislature.
In a statement, Evers called the complaint “great news for our democracy and for the people of our state whose demands for fair maps and a nonpartisan redistricting process have gone repeatedly ignored by their legislators for years”.
Protasiewicz, who was sworn in to the supreme court on Tuesday after winning a closely watched election on 4 April, has criticized Wisconsin’s legislative maps as unfair and campaigned on the issue. In an interview with the Capital Times, the Madison newspaper, Protasiewicz said she “would enjoy taking a fresh look at the gerrymandering question”.
This complaint is the first major voting rights case for Wisconsin’s new liberal majority on supreme court, which could decide more elections-related cases ahead of the 2024 elections.
Wisconsin voters have tried to challenge the state’s gerrymander in the federal courts in the past. In a 2018 case brought by 12 Wisconsin voters, the US supreme court ruled that the court could not weigh in on the plaintiff’s claim that the entire map was gerrymandered, asking the plaintiffs to return with a case focusing on specific districts. In a separate ruling in 2019, the court ruled that partisan gerrymandering could not be adjudicated by federal courts.
