A unanimous state Supreme Court today rejected two lawsuits asking the justices to redraw Wisconsin’s congressional maps in time for the 2026 elections.
The court offered no comment on its decision, though it rejected a similar request in early 2024 after throwing out the legislative lines that had been used for the 2022 elections.
Meanwhile, liberal Justice Janet Protasiewicz rejected motions in each of the suits that had sought her recusal. In identical decisions, she wrote the reasons cited by the parties seeking her recusal — including her comments about the maps during her 2023 campaign — didn’t warrant her stepping aside.
One of the new suits argued the districts when drawn failed to adhere to standards requiring the districts to have identical populations. That would be six districts with 736,715 people and two with 736,714. But some districts when drawn had 736,716 people. The suit, filed by the Campaign Legal Center, also argued the congressional map improperly split counties.
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The other suit involved Dem voters whose legal team includes the firm of Dem attorney Marc Elias, who is well known for his work on election cases. It argued the lines are a partisan gerrymander that violates protections in the Wisconsin Constitution for equal protection as well as free speech and association. The suit argued it does that by packing Democratic voters in the 2nd and 4th districts — the only two now represented by Dems — while diluting their share of the electorate in several other seats in a way that makes it impossible to elect a representative of their choice.
Both suits also argued the maps should be thrown out because they were based on a “least change” approach that was the foundation for the lines.
With Dem Gov. Tony Evers and GOP lawmakers unable to agree on a map, the state Supreme Court in 2021 directed the parties before it to address things like population changes while hewing as closely as possible to the existing maps for the Legislature and Congress that Republicans had approved in 2011. Ultimately, the courts chose Evers’ maps for the House seats and the GOP lines for the legislative districts. It ruled the guv’s congressional lines most closely aligned with the “least change” approach the court established as a requirement for the new maps.
But in 2023, a new 4-3 liberal majority ruled the legislative lines put in place a year earlier were unconstitutional because they included municipal islands. The court also threw out the “least change” principle in the process.
The new suits argued with that principle disavowed, there was no foundation to justify the current House lines.
The Elias suit also cast the 2011 process of drawing new House lines “the quintessential partisan gerrymander.”
But testimony from a previous court challenge to those lines instead portrayed them as largely an effort to protect the incumbents in those seats.
As part of that suit, Andrew Speth, who was chief of staff to then-U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Janesville, was deposed. He took the lead in drawing the lines and testified in his deposition that Ryan told him “we need to be fair and we need to try and be bipartisan and we obviously have to be legal, and so those were the three things that drove the conversations we had with all of the members.”
Speth also noted it was tradition for the members of the delegation to forward a map to the Legislature and Ryan wanted to continue that tradition to avoid the GOP-controlled Legislature taking over and turning it into a partisan fight.
