Huge SCOTUS Case Today About Gerrymandering!

This will be the first case about gerrymandering in over a decade, when Vieth v. Jubelirer deeply divided the court. Four justices -Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by then-Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Clarence Thomas stated that the court should never review partisan gerrymandering cases as it is too difficult to determine influence. Four other justices – Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and Stephen Breyer – disagreed. Kennedy agreed with the latter. Though they didn't decide in regards to that case, they left the door open to future cases. The future is now, as Gill v. Whitford will be argued today. This case is about the redistricting plan passed by Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature in 2011.

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The plan was amazingly on target. In the next election in 2012, Republicans, carried only a minority of the state vote — 48.6 percent — but, as the GOP map designers had privately predicted, Republicans still won close to two-thirds of the state assembly seats, a 60-to-39 seat majority.

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This ruling wouldn't only affect Wisconsin though, it could invalidate districts in up to 20 different states.

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In the last two decades, the GOP has greatly increased and entrenched its dominance in the state legislatures and Congress through the use of partisan redistricting. The GOP now has control of state legislatures in 32 states, covering 61 percent of the population, while Democrats control just 13 state legislatures, covering 28 percent of the population.

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Mathematecians created the effeciency gap method to try to determine how much partisan gerrymandering played a part in redistricting.

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The efficiency gap is simply the difference between the parties' respective wasted votes in an election, divided by the total number of votes cast. ... When a party gerrymanders a state, it tries to maximize the wasted votes for the opposing party while minimizing its own, thus producing a large efficiency gap

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Links:
Scotus Blog
Cornell Legal Information Institute
NYT
Economist
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