A divided three-judge panel of the US District Court for Wisconsin ruled last year against the Wisconsin map, concluding that the plaintiffs are correct and that the map’s gerrymandering is unconstitutional. Kenneth Ripple, the author of that opinion, wrote, "We conclude … that the evidence establishes that one of the purposes of [the district map] was to secure Republican control of the Assembly under any likely future electoral scenario for the remainder of the decade, in other words to entrench the Republican Party in power." [...]
While the Supreme Court has ruled on many aspects of the districting process — banning state legislative districts with unequal populations and banning districts intended to disenfranchise black voters — it has issued muddled opinions on the question of whether partisan gerrymanders are unconstitutional. There’s extensive case law on racial gerrymanders, which has established that racial discrimination in districting is subject to strict scrutiny by courts. [...]
The efficiency gap is key to the plaintiffs’ arguments in Gill v. Whitford. They proposed setting a threshold of 7 percent: If a districting plan produces a larger gap than that, if one party is getting a wasted-vote advantage of more than 7 percent of the total vote, then it’s getting a huge leg up, which will continue for a long time. As Yale Law School dean Heather Gerken noted in a Vox piece following the initial district court decision, a gap above that amount indicates that the disadvantaged party “would have almost no chance of taking control of the legislature during the 10-year districting cycle.”
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