The state of Wisconsin does not choose its state legislature in free and fair elections, and it has not done so for a very long time. A new lawsuit, filed just one day after Democrats effectively gained a majority on the state Supreme Court, seeks to change that.
The suit, known as Clarke v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, seeks to reverse gerrymanders that have all-but-guaranteed Republican control of the state legislature — no matter which party Wisconsin voters supported in the last election.
In 2010, the Republican Party had its best performance in any recent federal election, gaining 63 seats in the US House of Representatives and making similar gains in many states. This election occurred right before a redistricting cycle, moreover — the Constitution requires every state to redraw its legislative maps every 10 years — so Republicans used their large majorities in many states to draw aggressive gerrymanders.
Indeed, Wisconsin’s Republican gerrymander is so aggressive that it is practically impossible for Democrats to gain control of the state legislature. In 2018, for example, Democratic state assembly candidates received 54 percent of the popular vote in Wisconsin, but Republicans still won 63 of the assembly’s 99 seats — just three seats short of the two-thirds supermajority Republicans would need to override a gubernatorial veto.
The judiciary, at both the state and federal levels, is complicit in this effort to lock Democrats out of power in Wisconsin. In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), for example, the US Supreme Court held that no federal court may ever consider a lawsuit challenging a partisan gerrymander, overruling the Court’s previous decision in Davis v. Bandemer (1986).
Three years later, Wisconsin drew new maps which were still very favorable to Republicans, but that included an additional Black-majority district — raising the number of state assembly districts with a Black majority from six to seven. These new maps did not last long, however, because the US Supreme Court struck them down in Wisconsin Legislature v. Wisconsin Elections Commission (2022) due to concerns that these maps may have done too much to increase Black representation.
I like the idea of proportional representation, but I feel like there's a lot of value in having a "local" representative who's job is to be your representative. In pure PR systems it's hard to know who you actually voted for, and it's much harder to figure out who's representing you specifically. You're voting purely for the party and no one representative is your point of contact.
That's true, the problem is just it's really hard to have properly localized representation on a national level when your nation has millions of people. U.S. Representatives oversee hundreds of thousands of people and many senators serve millions, there's no way for them to get to know their constituents.
Yeah that's a big flaw with the US system. I don't think senators should exist in their current role. Blocks of representatives should serve the state's interests, land shouldn't get a vote - people should.
Limiting the size of Congress was a terrible decision. Ideally you should have a representative for something like every 50k or 100k people. That way it's still a diverse group you're representing, but it's manageable to actually be available for a decent number of them.
I fully agree, this is in large part what I meant by proportional representation. I don't mind the process of districting and making sure those districts are decently small, I just don't like that in large part that the democratic process in the United States is geared towards smaller states. I'm fully aware that the states at America's founding wouldn't go for abolishing the Senate or the electoral college, but things have changed and it's time for the government to change too.