The Whitford team has proposed using a data-driven method called an "efficiency gap" to calculate whether districts are being drawn in a way that unfairly favors one party.
The court announced Monday that it will consider whether district lines drawn by Wisconsin's Republican-controlled legislature in 2011 put Democratic legislators at a disadvantage.
"In the past it's been thrown out because it's been in violation of voting rights or civil rights laws, but gerrymandering has always been considered somewhat of a partisan exercise", he explains.
"Across the country, we're witnessing legislators of both parties seizing power from voters in order to advance their purely partisan purposes", Potter, a former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission", said in a statement. The two top Republicans in the Legislature, Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, say they're confident the Supreme Court will affirm the GOP maps.
Last year, a divided three-judge Federal District Court panel ruled that Republicans had gone too far. Wisconsin Republicans played the electoral map to get similar results - "majorities" with less than 50% of the votes cast.
Republican lawyers say their party's advantage reflects the "reality of political geography". "Of course, our neighbors to the south, Illinois, the Democrats have been doing this for years to the Republicans, so this could actually change the standard nationwide".
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In 2012, Republicans won 48.6 percent of the statewide vote for Assembly candidates but captured 60 of the Assembly's 99 seats.
This case could have "enormous ramifications", Steve Vladeck, a professor of law at the University of Texas School of Law, told CNN This would be the first time the court has "articulated a constitutional rule in this context", he said. This case has the potential to help make Congress and state legislatures truly democratic, by ensuring that voters choose their representatives. It could alter the tradition of political parties redrawing voting districts for their political advantage. In the past, cases that seek to end partisan gerrymandering have failed, because the justices were unable to concur on what the standard for constitutional districting was.
In most states, elected officials usually redraw the district maps once a decade for electing candidates to the state legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives.
In a subsequent ruling, the lower court ordered that the Legislature must have a new redistricting plan in place by November 1, 2017, for the 2018 general election. Justices plan to hear arguments from attorneys on July 18. Democrats accuse republicans of gerrymandering - drawing the lines in such a manner that makes it almost impossible for Democrats to win. After all, the Court's 1962 Baker v. Carr one-person-one-vote decision on districting had been an unprecedented intervention in the American political process, but also one that could be implemented by a simple formula yielding consistent outcomes and little need for ongoing supervision (take the number of people in a state and divide by the number of districts).
The measure, call the efficiency gap, shows how cracking (breaking up blocs of Democratic voters) and packing (concentrating Democrats within certain districts) results in wasted votes - excess votes for winners in safe districts and perpetually inadequate votes for the losers.
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