The Wisconsin Fair Maps Coalition has helped pass resolutions in 54 of 72 counties calling on the state legislature to adopt nonpartisan redistricting, with 11 more on the ballot in November.
BY DONALD SHAW
The Wisconsin Assembly became notorious for its gerrymandered districts after the 2018 election, when 63 of 99 seats went to Republicans despite the party winning only 46% of votes. The district maps drawn by Republicans in 2011 were so unrepresentative of the majority of voters that a study last year by Harvard’s Electoral Integrity Project gave them a score of just 3, out of a possible 100 for perceived integrity—lower than any other state. (In fact, their Dec. 2016 report rated the integrity of North Carolina’s voting district boundaries as just 7 out of 100, which was then “the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project.”)
The governing crisis in Wisconsin was underscored in April of this year, when photos of long in-person voting lines during the coronavirus crisis were broadcast nationwide. State Republicans had refused to entertain Democratic Governor Tony Evers’ proposal to mail more absentee ballots and postpone the primary in order to prepare for greater public safety amid the COVID pandemic.