buses in Madison. Oh, gotcha. Oh, stand by.
And anticipated expert analysis of new voting maps submitted to the Wisconsin Supreme Court
is out. Research fellow at the Lubar Center for Public Policy at the Marquette Law School, John Johnson joins us with his take. And thanks very much for being here.
My pleasure. So you analyze the maps with the criteria set forth by the Supreme Court. Overall, of all the maps submitted by the legislature, the governor, the law firms and others, which comports the most in your analysis.
There's not a clear winner across all of the criteria. Some do better on some metrics than others.
And do you think the court will accept any of these submitted maps?
I'm not sure. I think most or all of them meet the minimum constitutional requirements, uh, contiguity, equal populations, those kinds of things.
But the court has to make judgment calls about which of these criteria values most.
And then it is true, am I correct, that they could decide, you know, none of them really are up to muster. So we're going to send this to these map maker consultants. Is that the next step if it goes that way?
I think that's right. Uh, the, the opinion that the court released is not as clear as I would like it to be about the process that will follow here. But I think that's right. And these consultants they've hired have done that kind of work for other states.
So what was the most important criteria under consideration and how did the maps stack up on that?
Well, I think the most important criteria is equal populations. That's the whole point we do redistricting.
All of the plans have a population deviation of less than 2%. So I could imagine the justices simply deciding that all of them were equally good on that metric.
On the other hand, some of the plans have a deviation closer to 1% and some closer to 2 lower is better on this metric.
So we could also imagine the justices saying, well, we really prefer a plan to have the least population deviation, the most equal populations possible.
The other, you know, sort of pass fail is contiguity, which these plans all set out to achieve.
So you commented that the Republican legislature's map stuck to the least change from the last least change maps. How so?
That's right. So as you'll recall, the reason the old maps were thrown out was because of the many of the districts lacking contiguity.
And the legislative Republicans submitted a map where they essentially just made the fewest changes possible to resolve those contiguity issues.
Sort of the minimal changes needed to meet the new constitutional requirements the court laid out.
That ended up resulting in a lot of municipal and ward splits, actually, because the reason why those old districts were not contiguous is because the municipalities themselves were not contiguous.
So you described the Republicans as deliberately not playing ball with what the court requested.
Is that akin to kind of thumbing their nose at the process?
I, you know, I'll leave that to the listener to decide, but I think it's clear that the legislature was annoyed with what the court did and chose not to change the partisan impact of their map really at all, which is something that the court said they would explicitly consider.
So you usually a professor Barry Burden told us he thinks the number one effect will be shaking up incumbents whereby new maps could put them in the same district.
What are your observations about the number of proposed districts with multiple incumbents?
So as far as I'm able to tell, the legislative Republicans map wouldn't place any incumbents from either party in the same district consistent with that least change approach we were talking about.
All of the other plans would do that.
And particularly a lot of Republican incumbents would be placed in the same district.
So as I, as I've looked at this, I believe the plan submitted by the right petitioners would create 17 districts with no incumbents and then the plan submitted by law forward and the Senate Democrats.
Would create 19 districts with no incumbents.
And then the plan submitted by the conservative law firm will would create 18 districts with no incumbents.
And so if you're drawing these districts with no incumbents, that means incumbents are being paired together elsewhere.
Well, also this week, a lawsuit was filed over maps for Wisconsin's congressional districts.
Are they flawed under the court's new criteria?
Not the contiguity issue.
My understanding, I haven't read the filing, but from the reporting I've read that those lawyers are arguing that the least change approach is constitutionally flawed and asking the court to reject the old congressional map on those grounds.
Lots of redistricting all over the place, potentially.
John Johnson, thanks very much.
My pleasure.
Sorry to throw that congressional question at you.
It struck me as interesting.
And it also struck me as like kind of, and I wasn't going to say this on the air, but late in coming.
I mean, right?
Like just kind of piling on.
I don't know.
Not much time.
I mean, there's not a lot of time to get these state legislative maps changed.
Yeah.
Well, thank you.
Appreciate it very much.
I will tell you that here in our newsroom, a bunch of our journalists were like.