Oral arguments begin at 10:30 AM tomorrow in groundbreaking case against Wisconsin’s anti-competitive congressional districts

MADISON, Wis. — The Wisconsin Supreme Court tomorrow will hear oral arguments in Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy v. Wisconsin Elections Commission (WBLD v. WEC), the case brought by Law Forward and the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School on behalf of Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy and a group of Wisconsin voters challenging the state’s congressional map as an unconstitutional anti-competitive gerrymander..

The plaintiff-appellants will ask the Court to reverse a Dane County circuit court order that dismissed WBLD’s challenge and send it back for trial before the three-judge panel that first heard it. Plaintiffs argue that anti-competitive gerrymandering – maps drawn to protect incumbents of both parties from real electoral competition – is a distinct legal claim grounded in the Wisconsin Constitution’s text, drafting history, and case law, and that courts have a workable standard for deciding when a map has been unconstitutionally engineered to shield officeholders from accountability.

Wisconsin’s current congressional map was built by making minimal changes to district lines jointly drawn by legislators from both major parties a decade earlier to protect incumbents. Not a single incumbent has lost a congressional race in more than a decade under the map and its predecessor, even as Wisconsin remains one of the most closely divided states in the country in statewide elections.

“When a legislature draws maps built to protect its own members rather than to give the public a genuine choice about who represents them in Congress, that isn’t representative democracy, it’s locking voters out of it. The Wisconsin Constitution promises that government derives its power from the consent of the governed, and that promise is broken when election outcomes are locked in before voters ever get a say. We’re asking the Court to send this case back for trial so Wisconsin voters can finally have that say,” said Doug Poland, Law Forward Director of Litigation.

“Our claim is also judicially manageable,” said Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos, Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. “Courts across the country have managed to discern the deliberate suppression of competition, and Wisconsin courts would be equally good at this task. In the earlier Clarke litigation, the very intervenors in this case also used the empirical tools that we advocate for identifying anti-competitive effect: for example, computational redistricting, averages of statewide election results, and thresholds for competitive districts. If anything, these tools are even more reliable today.”

“Whatever our personal politics, we should be able to agree that elections for congressional and state legislative districts are supposed to be decided by voters in those districts, not by politicians drawing district boundaries to ensure their team prevails in elections,” said Tom Florsheim, Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy.

The case comes to the Wisconsin Supreme Court under a state law enacted specifically for redistricting challenges, which requires such cases to be heard first by a three-judge circuit court panel and appealed directly to the Supreme Court.