WISCONSIN: Partisan redistricting removes citizens’ voice

Wisconsin citizens are frustrated. Representative democracy no longer represents them.

Thanks to cleverly calculated redistricting, legislative seats are secure and politicians don’t have to care. Calls and letters to legislators are routinely ignored or answered with vapid form letters.

But citizens are fighting back.

In July, a group of Wisconsin residents sued the state Government Accountability Board over the state’s 2011 redistricting process. The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, identifies this redistricting as the cause for one-party domination of the state Legislature. In the 2012 elections, Republicans won 60 of 99 seats in the state Assembly, even though Democratic candidates received 174,000 more votes.

After the 2010 census, the newly elected Republican majority — with the expensive help of a high-powered law firm — redrew voter boundaries to lock in a Republican majority.

In a costly, secretive process, Republicans lawmakers were sworn to silence and allowed to view only their own districts. Democrats were excluded altogether. A federal court in Milwaukee called the process a “shameful attempt to hide the redistricting process from public scrutiny.”

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