A recent case before the Wisconsin Supreme Court threatened to replace the state’s legislative maps with new maps drawn by partisans and picked by the court. The case was ultimately mooted, but the bad social science advanced by the experts retained by the court deserves comment.
As background, the court had previously determined that existing maps conflicted with the Wisconsin Constitution’s requirement that legislative districts “consist of contiguous territory” (Art. IV § 4) and ordered new maps drawn—not merely rectified to address that complaint, but drawn from scratch. To do so, they invited map submissions from the different parties involved, including the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), a 501(c)3 public interest law firm (and the author’s employer). Furthermore, the court retained two social scientists who have published together on redistricting in the past, Bernard Grofman and Jonathan Cervas, and asked them to analyze the submissions.
Crucially, the court noted that by virtue of their role in the judiciary, “this court must remain politically neutral.” Therefore, they reasoned, in addition to ensuring that new maps would comply with the constitution’s requirements, they could not “enact maps that privilege one political party over another.” This was the pretext that allowed the court’s experts to argue for a partisan gerrymander.
The experts start off their report by reviewing all of the offered maps. Here, they not only acknowledge that the assembly and state senate maps championed in court by WILL comply with “traditional good government criteria,” but their tabulations show that WILL’s maps contain the fewest splits of county and municipality borders of any of the maps—this being an explicit requirement of the Wisconsin Constitution.