MADISON — Gov. Tony Evers today submitted fair maps to the Wisconsin Supreme Court for the Court to consider in ongoing redistricting litigation. The governor’s proposed maps for the districts of the Wisconsin State Legislature submitted today are responsive to the will of the people, avoid partisan bias, and increase the number of competitive legislative seats. Additional details on the governor’s submitted maps are available below.
“Wisconsinites don’t want Republican or Democrat maps because Wisconsin isn’t a red or blue state—we’re a purple state, and our maps should reflect that basic fact. I’ve always promised I’d fight for fair maps—not maps that favor one political party or another—and that’s a promise I’m proud to keep with the maps I’m submitting today,” said Gov. Evers.
Gov. Evers, represented by Attorney General Josh Kaul, previously filed a motion to intervene in the lawsuit before the Wisconsin Supreme Court challenging the state’s current legislative maps. Gov. Evers and Attorney General Kaul later filed a brief in the same lawsuit asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to declare Wisconsin’s legislative maps unconstitutional and institute new maps that avoid the partisan bias that has “infected” Wisconsin’s legislative maps “to the detriment of Wisconsin’s democracy.”
In a December ruling in Clarke v. WEC, the Wisconsin Supreme Court held Wisconsin’s state legislative maps were unconstitutionally noncontiguous. In so doing, the Court laid out a process for litigation parties to propose maps and indicated it will consider several criteria in reviewing and evaluating submitted remedial maps, including:
- Whether the maps comply with population equality requirements;
- Whether districts conform to Article IV of the Wisconsin Constitution, which requires districts to be compact and contiguous;
- Whether the maps comply with federal law;
- The degree of municipal splits and how maps preserve communities of interest; and
- Whether maps have a partisan bias so the Court can avoid “selecting remedial maps designed to advantage one political party over another.”
Gov. Evers today submitted remedial maps under the process set out by the Court that not only meet the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s requirements but also perform impressively under the Court’s metrics.
ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND - SUMMARY OF GOVERNOR’S FILING
In a brief filed with the Wisconsin Supreme Court today, Gov. Evers argues, “In vindicating the constitutional rights of Wisconsin citizens ... this Court can follow only one path: adopting districts that reject partisan bias and instead achieve ‘fair and effective representation for all citizens.’ ... Anything else would be ‘incompatible with democratic principles.’” As the party in this litigation who is elected statewide by the people of Wisconsin, “Only the governor ‘represents the people as a whole’... and the governor submits proposed maps that are, above all else, ‘responsive to the popular will.’”
To that end, Gov. Evers today submitted remedial maps for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to evaluate and consider that are unbiased, competitive, and responsive to Wisconsin voters and perform well when measured using constitutional and traditional redistricting criteria: the governor’s maps are “contiguous and significantly more compact than their predecessors” and “would create much more competitive districts that respond to prevailing political trends and provide all voters an opportunity to translate their votes into representation.”
Put simply: adopting the governor’s maps submitted today would “‘restore the core principle of republican government,’ namely, ‘that the voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around.’”
The governor’s proposed maps avoid political bias and are responsive to the will of the people of Wisconsin.
The governor’s lodestar in preparing the maps submitted today was simple: “the governor’s maps were drawn for the benefit of Wisconsin voters to ensure that each district is and will continue to be ‘responsive to the popular will.’”
“This means that, in some elections, under the governor’s maps, voters will elect a Republican majority and in others a Democratic majority,” the governor’s filing argues. “But, in all elections, the governor’s maps guard against an entrenched partisan effort to ‘defeat or circumvent the sentiments of the community.’ The maps are not designed for ‘partisan advantage.’ Rather, enactment of the governor’s maps will ensure that the Court makes good on its pledge that ‘its political neutrality must be maintained.’”
By way of example illustrating how the governor’s submitted maps are responsive to Wisconsin’s purple electorate, in the 2020 November general election results for president, President Joe Biden received 1,630,673 votes or 49.45 percent of the vote in defeating the former president, who received 1,610,065 votes or 48.83 percent of the vote—a slim margin of just 20,608 votes or .62 percent. Yet, under Wisconsin’s current maps, the election yielded a 64-35 Republican majority in the Wisconsin State Assembly and a 22-11 Republican supermajority in the Wisconsin State Senate. Had the maps the governor submitted today to the Wisconsin Supreme Court been in place during the 2020 November general election, the election would have instead yielded a divided Wisconsin State Legislature—a 50-49 Republican-controlled Wisconsin State Assembly and an 18-15 Democrat-controlled Wisconsin State Senate.
As another example illustrating responsiveness of the governor’s submitted remedial maps, a Wisconsin statewide electorate in 2022 re-elected both Gov. Evers, a Democrat, and U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), a Republican, respectively. In that election, Gov. Evers received 1,358,774 votes or 51.15 percent of the votes in the gubernatorial election, a margin of 90,239 votes or 3.4 percent over his opponent. U.S. Sen. Johnson received 1,337,185 votes or 50.41 percent of the votes in the U.S. Senate election, a margin of 26,718 votes or 1 percent over his opponent.
Examining these two different outcomes in the same statewide general election in Wisconsin for two different candidates vying for two different offices representing two different political parties under the maps submitted by the governor today yields an intuitive and responsive outcome: two different results for the makeup of the Wisconsin State Legislature. U.S. Sen. Johnson’s 2022 re-election results under maps submitted by the governor today would have yielded a Republican-controlled Wisconsin State Legislature—a 51-48 Republican-controlled Wisconsin State Assembly and a 17-16 Republican-controlled Wisconsin State Senate. Conversely, Gov. Evers’ 2022 re-election results under maps submitted by the governor today would have yielded a Democrat-controlled Wisconsin State Legislature—a 52-47 Democrat-controlled Wisconsin State Assembly, and an 18-15 Democrat-controlled Wisconsin State Senate.
Further, the filing argues, the governor’s maps submitted to the Wisconsin Supreme Court today:
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Improve upon the efficiency gap of previous plans.
- The governor’s plan improves upon the previous plans’ efficiency gap by 40 percent to 90 percent.
- The efficiency gap metric measures “wasted votes” or “‘the difference between the parties’ respective ‘wasted votes’ (i.e., the number of votes above the 50 percent plus one that a party needs to win an election), divided by the total number of votes cast.’”
- The governor’s maps reflect lower numbers of “wasted votes,” and significantly outperform the 2022 Enacted Plans and the 2021 Plans.
- The governor’s Assembly map has a low-efficiency gap of 3.77 percent to 6.4 percent, depending on the software and elections data used.
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Improve the mean-median gap compared to previous plans.
- Under the governor’s plan, the mean-median gap improves by around 40 percent compared to the previous maps.
- The mean-median gap measures “‘the difference between a party’s vote share in the median district and its average vote share across all districts.’”
- The governor’s maps reflect minimal difference between the parties’ vote share in median districts and across all districts, and significantly outperform the 2022 Enacted Plan and the 2021 Plan.
- The governor’s Assembly Plan has a mean-median gap of 2.9 percent, compared to five percent in the Assembly 2022 Enacted Plan, and 4.6 percent in the Assembly 2021 Plan. This translates to a mean-median improvement of up to 37 percent in the Assembly, and up to 42 percent in the Senate.
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Still somewhat favor Republicans but improve fairness by significantly reducing partisan advantage in favor of Republicans.
- The declination metric shows that the governor’s proposed maps somewhat favor Republicans but would improve fairness by reducing the Republican advantage in the previous maps by about 40 percent.
- Declination measures “the asymmetry in the distribution of votes across districts.”
- The governor’s maps reflect minimal asymmetry in the distribution of votes across districts, and significantly outperform the 2022 Enacted Plans and the 2021 Plans.
- Specifically, the governor’s proposed plan has a declination measure of .37 favoring Republicans, compared to .63 in the Assembly 2022 Enacted Plan and .59 in the Assembly 2021 Plan. Likewise, in the Senate, the governor’s proposed plan nearly cuts the previous maps declination scores favoring Republicans in half.
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Significantly improve metrics measuring whether respective political parties receive a corresponding share of legislative seats.
- The governor’s proposed plans improve upon partisan symmetry (also called partisan bias) by as much as 50 percent for the Assembly and 57 percent for the Senate.
- Partisan symmetry measures “‘whether each party would receive the same share of legislative seats assuming that each had identical percentage vote shares.’”
- The governor’s maps reflect desirable levels of partisan symmetry, and again, significantly outperform the 2022 Enacted Plans and the 2021 Plans.
- The partisan symmetry in the governor’s proposed Assembly plan is six percent, compared to 13.9 percent in the Assembly 2022 Enacted Plan, and 10.6 percent in the Assembly 2021 Plan. For the Senate, the governor’s proposed plan has a partisan symmetry score of seven percent. This again is far less than the Senate 2022 Enacted Plan’s score of 13.9 percent and the Senate 2021 Plan’s score of 12.9 percent.
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Increase the number of competitive seats in the Wisconsin State Legislature to ensure districts can flip from one party to another in competitive elections.
- The governor’s proposed plan could increase the number of competitive Assembly seats by 68 percent and could more than triple competitive Senate seats compared to the previous maps.
- This metric measures districts that can flip from one party’s control to another in competitive elections. The number of competitive seats in a plan is reflective of its responsiveness.
- The governor’s maps reflect ample competitive seats and significantly outperform the 2022 Enacted Plan and the 2021 Plan.
- There are 32 competitive seats in the governor’s proposed Assembly plan, compared to just 19 in the 2022 Enacted Plan, and 24 in the 2021 Plan. The governor’s proposed Senate plan increases competitive seats to 11, from just three competitive seats in the 2022 Enacted Plan and just five in the 2021 Plan.
The governor’s proposed maps perform impressively on traditional districting criteria.
In addition to avoiding political bias and being responsive to the Wisconsin electorate, the governor’s maps submitted to the Wisconsin Supreme Court today not only comply with federal law and have minimal deviations in population distribution among legislative districts but join communities of interest together and contain only contiguous districts that are highly compact, as excerpted from the governor’s filing with the Court:
- For both maps, the governor’s proposed plans deviate from the ideal by no more than one percent—in other words, the maps fall within the de minimis safe harbor of a total range of deviation of two percent.
- All of the districts in the governors’ proposal are contiguous. That is, every district in the proposed plans is physically connected such that one can travel to all points in the district without crossing another district’s lines.
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The Wisconsin Constitution also requires that Assembly districts “be in as compact form as practicable.”
- The “Reock” and “Polsby-Popper” measure “compare a district to a circle which is considered the most compact shape.”
- The governor’s proposed Assembly districts perform impressively under these compactness metrics.
- The Assembly plan has a Reock score of .42 and a Polsby-Popper score of .35. That is more compact (as the score is higher) than the Assembly districts in the 2022 Enacted Plan, which score .38 on Reock and .24 on Polsby-Popper—that is, in the governor’s proposal, the Polsby-Popper score jumps from .24 to .35. The governor’s proposed Assembly map similarly improves upon the 2021 Plan, which had a Reock score of .40 and a Polsby-Popper score of only .26.
- The governor’s Senate map is nearly 50 percent more compact under the Polsby-Popper measure than the previous two plans.
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The governor’s proposed maps retain the prior configurations of Assembly Districts 8–12 and 16–-8’s without changes because they were contiguous and satisfied all other redistricting criteria.
- It is established that Milwaukee area Assembly Districts 10–12 and 16–18, which were enacted in the 2022 maps, are “indisputably race-neutral” and were drawn with no race-based motivation.
- Accordingly, the proposed maps raise no equal protection issue or other federal issue.
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The governor’s maps promote communities of interest in various ways across the state.
- The term ‘communities of interest’ refers not only to physically connected communities but also to shared social, economic, and institutional interests.
- For instance, the governor’s maps newly join Lake Superior shoreline communities that have strong maritime traditions and economic and cultural connections.
- Additionally, for example, unlike the previous maps, the governor’s proposed configuration puts essentially all of the City of Green Bay (with the exception of two wards) into one Senate district.
Further, and importantly, the governor’s maps likewise reduce county and municipal splits compared to previous plans. The Wisconsin Supreme Court’s previous decision explained that parties should consider “the extent to which assembly districts split counties, towns, and wards (particularly towns and wards as the smaller political subdivisions).”
- In all, the governor’s maps perform impressively on splits, lowering the number of municipal and county splits, and containing only de minimis, temporary ward splits.
- The Assembly maps split just 55 municipalities compared with 59 municipal splits in the 2022 Enacted Plan and 78 municipal splits in the 2021 Plan. That is, the Governor’s Assembly map lowers the number of municipal splits as compared to those recent plans, and significantly lowers them compared to the 2021 Plan. Likewise, the proposed Assembly plan lowers county splits—it has only 45, compared to 53 for the 2022 Enacted Plan and 58 for the 2021 Plan.
- The Senate plan likewise compares favorably. It has 33 municipal splits as compared to 35 in the 2022 Enacted Plan. And it has only 33 county splits, compared to 42 in the 2022 Enacted Plan.
- The governor’s Assembly map also has a minimal amount of ward splits—five—two of which relate to a no-longer-existing municipality.
A copy of the governor’s full filing is available here. The governor’s proposed maps are available here:
Wisconsin State Assembly
Wisconsin State Senate
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