Dairyland Sentinel Update: Redistricting

Redistricting ‘experts’ hired by liberal State Supreme Court majority relied on bad data for their analysis and recommendations

[9:17a March 7, 2024]

When two ‘experts’ were hired by the Wisconsin Supreme Court to analyze maps submitted by various groups, they unsurprisingly came forward with criticism of the maps introduced by Republicans and the conservative organization, Wisconsinites for Law & Liberty (WILL)..

That was to be expected. However, one critique was an odd one.

The experts complained that the map introduced by WILL should not be considered, in part, because it broke up several municipal wards.

This critique was highlighted by liberal activists.

But as WILL noted in their response, the ‘experts’ analysis was wrong. Their complaint about breaking up municipal wards was inaccurate.

Shortly after WILL submitted their response, the legislature moved to pass new maps, so the ‘experts’ errors were never publicly exposed. Until today.

How did these ‘experts’ become involved in the case? In a split decision, the liberal majority of the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that the legislative maps passed two years ago by the Wisconsin legislature were invalid. The Court then took the extraordinary step of hiring their own so-called ‘experts,’ Bernard Grofman and Jonathan Cervas to analyze the maps.

Grofman is a political science and economics professor at the University of California-Irvine, where he was Cervas’ advisor. Cervas now teaches at Carnegie Mellon University.

Joe Handrick, former Republican lawmaker and an actual expert regarding Wisconsin redistricting, lays out the facts regarding Grofman and Cervas’ bungling of the analysis in a series of posts on the social media platform X this morning. Handrick is professional and dispassionate in his factual analysis of their work. But Grofan and Cervas’ errors are undeniable.

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The Evers brief said, “the repeated failure of Respondents’ plans to conform to the ‘bounded by’ constitutional requirement is disqualifying.”

Because new maps have been enacted, this contradiction by Evers received little attention and it’s now just a part of history.
— joe handrick (@joeminocqua) March 7, 2024

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Thus, the out-of-state consultants reported on ward splits, but based that report on old wards!

The consultants said in their “non-partisan” report: “The Johnson plan appears to have a substantial number of fails of the ‘bounded by’ constitutional criteria.”
— joe handrick (@joeminocqua) March 7, 2024

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To be clear, the DEMs were wrong in their assertion that a plan with split wards was unconstitutional.

But they were all too willing to jump on that bandwagon when the consultants mistakenly asserted that only GOP maps should be discarded because they split wards.
— joe handrick (@joeminocqua) March 7, 2024

So to summarize, the partisan “experts” hired by the liberal State Supreme Court majority not only subjectively judged the ‘fairness’ of the map, they not only made up ‘good government’ criteria by which the maps were judged, they also used bad data.

Charitably, these experts were let’s just say, less than brilliant here in their effort to discredit the WILL maps.

Legally, all court cases against the 2022 maps are moot, since the legislature passed new maps last month. As we shared here in earlier Key Read summaries, Republicans chose the least onerous of what they perceived to be four bad options, and passed maps proposed by Governor Evers.

However, we also highlighted that these so-called experts billed the state of Wisconsin $128,000 for their analysis.

As this news is just breaking, there is no word if there will be fall out from the revelation that the ‘experts’ screwed up. We would not be surprised, however, if someone suggests they shouldn’t get paid so handsomely for such shoddy work.

Moreover, chew on this for a minute. If the Wisconsin Supreme Court really cared about split municipalities as a concern on whether the maps were legitimate, the current maps signed by Governor Evers most assuredly are not.

The whole effort was a lesson in rank hypocrisy. They stipulated to using old ward lines, thereby ignoring one of their main complaints in their earlier analysis. This was a farce. Paid for by us, and foisted upon us thanks to the help of a mainstream press that took the ‘experts’ word as gospel.