Pledge to keep redistricting public
Later this year Wisconsin’s legislature will take up the task of adjusting the legislative district boundaries in response to census changes. Local legislators must ensure that process is done in the open where voters can hold elected officials accountable for their decisions.
Just like in high school math class, legislators should have to show their work and be able to explain and defend their decision making. This gives the voters the opportunity to decide if they are OK with how the process was conducted and gives them the chance, come election time, to either reward or punish those choices.
Every 10 years the state redraws the legislative and congressional district boundaries. The goal of this exercise is to ensure that districts are roughly the same size in regard to constituent population. What has happened, more often than not, is the lines have been drawn to protect incumbents and ensure, as much as possible, that the party in power stays in power. Gerrymandering has been used by both parties, some are just better at it than others.
There are many pie-in-the-sky ideas about how the redistricting system should work. These include governor Tony Evers’ People’s Map Commission. The commission has been holding virtual hearings around the state for months getting people excited about the possibility of legislative districts where voters might actually be the ones to select their elected officials and not the other way around.
In the most likely scenario, the People’s Map Commission recommendations will be summarily ignored by party leadership in the legislature and instead a plan will be presented to shore up areas of weakness and whittle away at areas where the opposition is stronger. That harsh realism is how the game is played on both sides of the political aisle. Ignoring this in favor of a Pollyanna approach to how it “should” work is to take a trip to fantasyland.
As the adage goes, making laws is a lot like making sausage, with the exception that meat inspectors know what goes into the sausage. The Good Lord only knows what happens when lawmakers go behind closed doors, especially with redistricting. The last time Wisconsin’s districts were redrawn, Republican leadership hired private consultants, at taxpayer expense, who prepared a map outside of public input or scrutiny. As recent statewide elections have shown, the political landscape of Wisconsin is evenly divided between both major parties. Despite this, the maps created district boundaries that have helped ensure strong Republican majorities for the past decade.
The major difference between 10 years ago and now is that the governor happens to be a Democrat and is about as likely to accept a Republican-drawn map as the legislature is to accept the one being drawn by Peter Pan or the People’s Map Commission. The end result will be to have the courts decide and millions of taxpayer dollars going to buy vacation homes for the lawyers involved in the case rather than toward education, roads or fighting crime.
By showing their work and being able to defend their choices, the legislature will be able to make a much stronger case as to why their maps should be favored over others. Beyond this, somewhat cynical reason, the lawmakers should pledge to keep the process open because it is the right thing to do.
