In the War Against Gerrymandering, an Army of Voters Meets a Dug-in Foe
In the War Against Gerrymandering, an Army of Voters Meets a Dug-in Foe
Grassroots campaigns against partisan district maps won big victories last year, but after an adverse Supreme Court ruling, they face an uphill battle. Wisconsin shows why.
Hans Breitenmoser, a dairy farmer and Lincoln County supervisor, with his son Calvin, 9, in Merrill, Wis. Mr. Breitenmoser persuaded fellow supervisors in 2017 to adopt a resolution calling for the state to turn the drawing of district maps over to a nonpartisan commission.Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times
MERRILL, Wis. — When the Supreme Court concluded this summer that it had no authority to strike down partisan political maps, no matter how outrageous, Chief Justice John G. Roberts offered solace to those who call the maps dangerous to democracy. Maybe federal judges cannot outlaw gerrymanders, he wrote in the court’s majority opinion. But voters surely could.
Here in Lincoln County, a fir-carpeted swath of rural northern Wisconsin, that is starting to look like no simple task.
In March 2017, the county board of supervisors passed a resolution urging the state to create a nonpartisan panel to take over mapmaking from politicians in the State Legislature. That kick-started a movement that has now seen 47 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties — representing three-fourths of the population — issue similar resolutions. Atop that, voters in eight counties, including Lincoln, have overwhelmingly endorsed nonpartisan mapmaking in referendum votes.
That is striking, because many of those counties, including Lincoln, are Republican bastions in a state where Republicans have so deftly filleted the state legislative map that a Democratic landslide in November barely dinged their dominance.
“History tells us that our legislators are not going to have the courage to do the right thing unless they get nothing but pressure,” Hans Breitenmoser, a dairy farmer and Lincoln County supervisor, said in an interview. “And the only way to do that is a grass-roots movement.”
But two and one-half years of grass-roots appeals have hardly budged the Republican majority in the State Legislature that rigged the state’s political maps to begin with.
In a statement last month, State House Speaker Robin Vos, one of those maps’ chief architects, said that legislation to finally set up a nonpartisan redistricting panel of the kind Lincoln County and others were endorsing would hand over the Legislature’s lawful authority to ”an unelected, unaccountable board of bureaucrats.”
A bill to create a nonpartisan panel, introduced in June, has drawn only four of the State Assembly’s 64 Republicans as co-sponsors. An identical bill in the State Senate has no Republican backers at all.
The reason is obvious, said Kenneth Mayer, a University of Wisconsin political scientist and an expert on gerrymandered maps: Nonbinding referendums and resolutions — even those with overwhelming public support — are the equivalent of Nerf guns in a political battle that demands heavy artillery.
“Is there any evidence that anyone has lost an election because they oppose a nonpartisan redistricting process?” he asked. “When people start losing their seats because of a policy position, that’s when they get religion. And I don’t think there’s much evidence that that has happened.”
Some measure of gerrymandering has traditionally been practiced by both parties; in Maryland and Illinois, for example, Democratic majorities have ignored or rejected pleas to take politics out of map-drawing. But by far the greatest resistance to fair maps has come from Republicans, who mounted a wildly successful campaign in 2010 to control the statehouses across the country that draw political districts. Since then, the party has embraced gerrymanders, some of them so extreme that they effectively consign opponents to permanent minority status.
Wisconsin is but one indicator that a citizen-led crusade against gerrymandering, a movement that had begun to score major victories before the Supreme Court’s decision in June, may find the struggle harder now, and success more elusive. The easy battles have largely been won, experts say. And with the Supreme Court’s refusal to regulate partisan maps, they say, the politicians who benefit most from them are less subject to outside pressure than ever.
“The low-hanging fruit has been picked and eaten,” Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia political science professor and election analyst, said of the campaign against gerrymandering.
There has been some progress. Last year, voters in four Republican-controlled states approved ballot initiatives that diluted partisan control of mapmaking. The legislature in a fifth state, Colorado, handed map-drawing to a nonpartisan panel to head off another grass-roots drive for a constitutional amendment.
And in Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court stepped in last year where federal courts had held back, ruling that a congressional map gerrymandered by Republicans violated the State Constitution.
This year, other ballot initiatives are underway or contemplated in Virginia, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Arkansas, all states where Republicans control mapmaking. And anti-gerrymandering forces are pressing a lawsuit in North Carolina’s state court system, aimed at undoing a gerrymandered state legislative map.
But opponents already are working to undo some of those redistricting initiatives. A group tied to the National Republican Redistricting Trust, an arm of the Republican Party, filed a suit last week arguing that a citizen redistricting commission approved by Michigan voters last year is “blatantly unconstitutional.”
In Missouri, a Republican effort to cripple a citizen redistricting initiative that was approved last year passed the State House, though it died in the Senate. Utah Republicans are considering changing a nonbinding redistricting initiative that voters approved last year, just as they already have altered two other unrelated ballot measures. Last week, New Hampshire’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu, vetoed legislation broadly backed by both parties that would have established independent redistricting there.
And in Arizona, where voters approved a nonpartisan redistricting initiative in 2000, Democrats accuse Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, of packing political allies onto the panel that vets prospective members of the Independent Redistricting Commission that will draw maps in 2021.
Because the free-speech and election provisions of most state constitutions are stronger than those in the federal Constitution, state-based lawsuits against gerrymandering, like those in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, are at least plausible in most states. But 38 of the 50 state supreme courts are elected, often in highly partisan contests that limit the prospects for those kinds of suits to reach favorable rulings.
A total of 18 states allow residents to place constitutional amendments on the ballot for voter approval, and a number of those states have already moved to nonpartisan mapmaking. In some of the remaining states, the route to getting an anti-gerrymandering measure on the ballot is strewn with technical hurdles.
In the large number of states where ballot initiatives are not allowed, changing legislators’ minds, suing them or voting them out of office are the only ways to rein in partisan maps. And in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, legislators have even less incentive to surrender their redistricting power — particularly the power to draw congressional maps — unless legislators elsewhere do the same and create new momentum among voters.
For example, Democrats in Maryland, where the congressional map has been gerrymandered against Republicans, have said that they would not be inclined to adopt nonpartisan redistricting and risk reducing the Democratic presence in the House of Representatives unless Republican legislatures in other states did the same.
In Virginia, the Republican-run General Assembly easily approved a proposed constitutional amendment in November establishing nonpartisan redistricting procedures — perhaps, analysts say, because they saw a chance that Democrats might seize a majority in elections this fall. Should Democrats take power, some analysts say, they may well be unwilling to grant the second vote of approval needed to place the issue on the 2020 ballot.
“Why would they give up a power the electorate would have just given them?” Mr. Sabato asked. “They were screwed by the Republicans in 2011” — in the last round of redistricting — “and being politicians, they’ll want to return the favor in 2021.”
No state epitomizes the potential roadblocks more than Wisconsin, where the electorate is all but equally split between the left and right, but the Legislature has remained lopsidedly Republican since the last political maps were drawn in 2011.
The State Constitution does not allow a citizens’ ballot initiative to make redistricting nonpartisan. Anti-gerrymandering advocates say a lawsuit in state courts challenging the Legislature’s maps would be a waste of time; bitterly fought judicial elections, notable for heavy spending by out-of-state interests, have produced a solidly pro-Republican state Supreme Court.
Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat elected in last year’s landslide, can veto laws implementing Republican-drawn maps in 2021 if he deems the maps too partisan. But news reports this month indicated that conservative activists in the state were discussing a plan to enact redistricting through a joint resolution, which cannot be vetoed, rather than through a law.
Republican legislative leaders called the report “rumor-mongering by Democratic activists” and said neither the Legislature’s Republican caucus nor its lawyers had discussed the idea. Neither Mr. Vos, the House Speaker, nor the State Senate majority leader, Scott L. Fitzgerald, responded to questions from The Associated Press and The New York Times about whether they had in fact ruled that tactic out.
The Legislature’s 2011 gerrymandered maps drew a muted backlash years ago. In 2013 and 2014, supervisors in eight counties approved resolutions calling on the Legislature to make a plan for drawing nonpartisan maps, and voters in one heavily Democratic county backed the idea in a referendum. But not until 2017, when Mr. Breitenmoser brought the idea of a resolution to fellow Lincoln County supervisors, did other counties start to pay attention.
Mr. Breitenmoser is a Democrat, but he said his interest in redistricting was driven not by partisan politics but by local concerns like the state of Lincoln County’s roads, which receive so little state money that the board has levied a $20 annual fee on vehicles registered in the county to compensate.
The more he probed the redistricting issue, Mr. Breitenmoser said, the more strongly he believed that the Legislature was not responding to counties’ concerns, in part because legislators’ districts are drawn to shield them from serious election challenges. “It doesn’t take a political scientist to understand that the way lines are drawn benefits no one except the people who drew the lines,” he said.
Mr. Breitenmoser’s resolution, a nonbinding expression of sentiment, passed the 27-member Lincoln County board in March 2017 with only a sprinkling of opposition. It quickly drew applause from the Wisconsin Farmers Union, and won support that September from 56 of the 66 county representatives at the Wisconsin Counties Association. Supervisors in other counties began calling him for advice on passing their own resolutions.
The 47 resolutions passed to date largely call for Wisconsin to follow neighboring Iowa, which leaves map drawing to nonpartisan experts but allows legislators to make changes — not behind closed doors, but in public. Iowa’s method, first used in 1980, is widely considered a model for nonpartisan map-drawing.
The counties, their association and the farmers’ union all have telegraphed their positions of support to leaders in Madison, the state capital. Lincoln County, at least, has heard nothing in response.
“You know, the system we have has worked very well for them,” Mr. Breitenmoser said.
It may continue to. The counties’ progress in recruiting new supporters of nonpartisan maps has been glacial.
The four Republican sponsors of the anti-gerrymandering legislation that was filed in June were three more than backed the same bill in the previous legislative session. Among the new sponsors was Representative Loren Oldenburg, a farmer who represents Vernon County, abutting the Mississippi River in the state’s southwest.
Mr. Oldenburg signed on after Vernon County, which passed a redistricting resolution in 2017, followed up with a referendum in April. In that plebiscite, 71 percent of voters supported nonpartisan redistricting.
“I was very pleasantly surprised,” Dennis Brault, the chairman of the Vernon County board, said of Representative Oldenburg’s decision. “I think a lot of it had to do with the referendum. It made a difference.”
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