Political Fairness in Redistricting: What Wisconsin's Experience Teaches

[...]Democrats maintained their majorities in both houses.60 And a Democratic governor, Tony Earl, was elected to succeed Republican Lee Dreyfus.61 In the first legislative session after the 1982 elections, State Representative David Travis introduced an amendment to the state budget bill that contained a redistricting map designed to replace the worst features of the Evans map.62 Travis wryly entitled the amendment a "state cartography program. Unfortunately, it made no such effort. [...]the 2002 map wound up magnifying the partisan bias of the 1992 map; subsequently, the Republicans won substantial majorities in both houses of the legislature. 105 Republicans might argue that the reason that all of these courtcreated plans had a Republican bias was because of the effect of residential geography, i.e., the fact that Republicans tend to be spread out more evenly across the state while Democrats are concentrated in urban areas.106 To a certain extent, this is a valid point, although Republicans sometimes overstate it as they did in Gill.107 Also, it is now possible to measure the effect precisely by using a computer to draw hundreds or thousands of neutral maps and averaging the geographical bias they produce.108 In any case, under the standard of political fairness that I propose in this Essay, which is based on the preferences rather than the residences of voters, residential geography would not matter. [...]if Wisconsin is a 51% Democratic State, then 51% of the legislative districts in the State should, at a minimum, lean Democratic. [...]the first step in developing a redistricting plan that respects the state's voters by being politically fair is to determine whether the state is Republican or Democratic and to what extent. [...]a redistricting entity could consider more than five elections, but in my view five elections are sufficient to reduce the effect of anomalous elections (e.g., high turnout midterms) while not going overly far back in time. [...]to determine the political complexion of the state with precision, I would suggest that the redistricting entity take the last five presidential or gubernatorial elections, calculate the percentage of votes received by candidates of both major parties in these elections and average them.