On, Wisconsin!

The President of the Class of 1968 of Northwestern High School in Baltimore is Michael Switzenbaum.  (Two other members of that class are contributors to the RBC.)  Mike is one of the named plaintiffs in the Wisconsin case challenging the GOP’s gerrymandering of the Wisconsin State Assembly.  I have posted a copy of the amended complaint.

The amended complaint goes into great detail as to the methods by which the gerrymander was effected and designed and the results.  But one need only to read this passage from the first paragraph of the amended complaint:

As explained in greater detail below, the Current Plan [that is, the GOP gerrymander] is, by any measure, one of the worst partisan gerrymanders in modern American history. In the first election in which it was in force (2012), the Current Plan enabled Republican candidates to win sixty of the Assembly’s ninety-nine seats even though Democratic candidates won a majority of the statewide Assembly vote. The evidence is overwhelming that the Current Plan was adopted to achieve precisely that result: indeed, before submitting the map for approval, the Republican leadership retained an expert (at State expense) who predicted the partisan performance of each proposed district—as it turned out, with remarkable accuracy.

(Emphasis in the original.)

Obviously, Mike got a good education at our alma mater.

 

4 thoughts on “On, Wisconsin!”

  1. I don't much care how Wisconsin elects their state legislature. That's for the people of Wisconsin to work out. But I'm not sure why states are allowed to rig their elections for House of Representatives, which affect all of us.

    1. Amen, brother. Divide them into the most geometrically compact/efficiently-drawn areas of 500,000 people, by federal mandate, and let the chips fall where they may.

      1. You can't really leave it at that. They could still pack most of the Democratic voters into a relatively few districts, mainly by centering a few districts around urban areas. You need some additional rules to prevent such packing. It gets to be philosophically complicated as to whether you want all or most districts merely to be competitive, or if you want to achieve some minimum representation for minority groups that might be shut out if their votes were widely distributed, or some combination of these goals.

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