Better maps

Gov. Tony Evers on Tuesday unveiled the People’s Maps Commission redistricting maps on Tuesday and, with Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) making public GOP maps in late October, Wisconsin voters can now scrutinize both maps and see which ones they like best.

We like the governor’s maps better. They are more compact.

The commission’s maps lay out four assembly districts for Marathon County. They are generally boxlike and respect county borders. The GOP plan lays out five assembly districts across the county. They are irregularly shaped with lots of indents and carve outs. The proposed 87th Assembly District is huge, extending over 100 miles from Edgar to Hayward. It is shaped like a giant Slinky.

We want political maps in Wisconsin where districts share some local geography and communities of interest, not set up to maximize the vote count for either political party.

We think less gerrymandered districts produce better government. We’ve lived with the current, severely gerrymandered districts for a decade now and, as far as we can tell, our state politicians are less responsive. We don’t ever see them at local office hours. They rarely show up for local government meetings. Sometimes they don’t even answer the phone. You can leave a message and never get a return call back. This is what happens when political results are guaranteed by gerrymandered maps. It’s all but guaranteed that a judge will draw Wisconsin’s redistricting maps. Our hope is that this magistrate will draw lines based on standard criteria — compactness, communities of interest, county borders — not politics.

Politics should be a contest of who has the best ideas, not a game of legal conquest.

Editorials by Peter Weinschenk, The Record-Review