November 21, 2016 – Milwaukee, WI – Rick Esenberg, president and general counsel at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, released the following statement in response to the federal court ruling in Whitford v. Gill, the lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Wisconsin’s legislative maps:
“Today’s decision on redistricting represents a substantial departure from past judicial practice. It invalidates a plan which, by the majority’s own admission, comports with traditional districting principles. It does so on the basis of no more than the commonplace observation that the majority party sought to maximize its chances and that it might have been possible to rig the plan in a way that would have made the outcomes of individual races closer to the aggregated statewide vote. But, in America, we elect legislators by district and not statewide votes. In a country where Democratic voters tend to be less geographically dispersed, the lack of proportionality between how many votes all Democrats obtained statewide and how many seats the Democrats win – what the court called an “efficiency gap” – is to be expected. It is not a sign of unfairness but a product of the fact that we use geographic districts to elect our legislators.”