Justices take on fight over partisan electoral maps

The Supreme Court on Monday stepped, somewhat hesitantly, into the long-standing constitutional controversy over partisan gerrymandering, accepting a major test case for review and giving itself several issues to consider.

We are pleased that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear what potentially could be the most consequential partisan gerrymandering case in years.

In May, the Supreme Court invalidated state electoral maps in North Carolina, after finding that Republicans legislators re-drew them to diminish the political clout of African-American voters.

If the Court deems partisan gerrymandering unconstitutional (this would be the first such case in Supreme Court history) the precedent could drastically alter the redistricting plans set for after 2020, a responsibility that the GOP controls in most states.

After winning control of the state legislature in 2010, Wisconsin Republicans redrew the statewide electoral map. This formula is now the subject of a federal lawsuit, Whitford v. Nichol, which has survived two motions, submitted by defenders of Wisconsin's Republican-drawn maps, that sought to kill the case. The four liberal Justices dissented.... With gerrymandering now far more widespread thanks to the use of mapping software, will they finally take the opportunity to rein it in?

The challengers have continued to push their argument at the U.S. Supreme Court. The Republican National Committee and 12 Republican states have asked the Supreme Court to reverse the lower court's decision that the Wisconsin electoral map was an unconstitutionally partisan gerrymander. The case, which the court will hear in the nine-month term that starts in October, could open the way for a new wave of election litigation. Michigan's state Senate has 27 Republicans, 11 Democrats.

In this case, Registered Democratic voters asserted that Republicans used two techniques, cracking and packing, to weaken the effect of Democratic votes state wide.

The US Supreme Court will evaluate whether gerrymandered election maps drawn to give a political party an unfair advantage are unconstitutional, which could result in a fundamental change to the way American elections are conducted.

Last year, a divided three-judge Federal District Court panel ruled that Republicans had gone too far.

"I would not foreclose all possibility of judicial relief if some limited and precise rationale were found to correct an established violation of the Constitution in some redistricting cases", Kennedy wrote at the time.

A divided panel of three judges in Wisconsin ruled previous year that the map drawn up by the state's GOP leadership in 2011 was so partisan that it violated First Amendment and equal rights protections in the Constitution.

A three-judge court struck down the districts as an illegal partisan gerrymander and ordered new ones to be put in place for the 2018 elections.

"As I have said before, our redistricting process was entirely lawful and constitutional, and the district court should be reversed", Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel said. In the 2016 election, Republicans won 10 of 13 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives while receiving just 304,000 more total combined votes in the 13 House races. It argues, for example, that the plaintiffs can not challenge the map in its entirety, but instead need to go district by district, and that the plan can not be a partisan gerrymander if it is also consistent with traditional redistricting principles.

The groups challenging Wisconsin's case developed a new metric for measuring partisanship that they call the "efficiency gap".