The column below reflects the views of the author, and these opinions are neither endorsed nor supported by WisOpinion.com.
Let’s suppose that the Wisconsin Supreme Court decides in the Clarke case that the constitution means what it says when it requires that assembly districts “consist of contiguous territory.” Then, the court will want a brand-new assembly map in its Christmas stocking. Who would prefer a darned-up version of the one we have now (SB621)?
Wisconsin Maps Assessment Project (WIMAP) has done its shopping early. Here is a gift that we would like to present to SCOWIS courtesy of Dave’s Redistricting App (DRA) – WIMAP23; a strictly contiguous, higher performing Assembly district map. As you can see from the radial graph, the orange pentagon summarizing the ratings for WIMAP23 in DRA’s five major assessment categories beats SB621’s green one like paper covers rock.
Can SCOWIS exchange our present for a better one? To do so the map would have to have a Reock compactness score higher than .4203, split fewer than 39 counties fewer than 103 times, and have fewer than 66 split municipalities. In comparison, DRA reports that SB621 has a Reock score of .3582, splits 53 counties 156 times and has 51 split municipalities. (The number of split municipalities will undoubtedly have to increase as over 50 districts in SB621 are made to be contiguous.)
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Like SB621, WIMAP23 has two majority Hispanic voting age population districts and five majority Black voting age population (BVAP) districts. Both maps have one BVAP district in the 45 – 50% range, but WIMAP23 has an additional district with a 39% BVAP. DRA reports that WIMAP23 has 24 districts in the 45 – 55% competitive range, while SB621 fields only 16. WIMAP23’s efficiency gap score of 7.74%, much lower than SB621’s 11.25%, indicates that it is far better at not advantaging one party over the other.
If the Clarke parties come up with maps that take scissors to WIMAP23’s paper, we won’t mind. In that case Wisconsin wins! To learn more about the work WIMAP does, check out our new report, Wisconsin Redistricting 2020 – 2022.
— Don Leake of the WI Map Assessment Project is a retired UW-River Falls math professor.
