July 12, 2021
by Matthew Rothschild, Executive Director
On July 9, Gov. Tony Evers did a good thing: He vetoed a bad Republican bill that would have delayed local redistricting for a couple years.
The bill, Assembly Bill 369, ostensibly was designed to account for the delay in the delivery of Census data, which has made it impossible for counties to redraw their maps by the July 1 deadline in the statutes. (The Census data isn’t likely to arrive now until mid-August.)
But there was more to this bill than meets the eye. First, Speaker Robin Vos’s fingerprints were all over it, as the Wisconsin Examiner pointed out, which in and of itself raises eyebrows, since Vos is keen on rigging the maps again or keeping the old rigged maps as long as possible.
Second, the bill would have required local units of government to bow to any new political lines that the Legislature draws, which goes against our tradition of respecting home rule and starting from local wards and districts drawn by municipalities and counties and building the map from there.
Third, as Gov. Evers wrote in his veto message, the delay in redrawing maps under this bill would have led to “malapportioned maps that do not accurately reflect current populations, which violates the constitutional principle of one person, one vote.” Every district in Wisconsin is supposed to have an equal number of people in it so that everyone’s voice is equal. But over the last ten years, a lot of areas, like Dane County, have seen a large increase in population growth. So people in districts in Dane County now have less a voice than people in districts that have seen no growth in their population or have actually seen a drop in their population. Maintaining the old district lines until 2023 or 2024 would be depriving the people in Dane County and other growth areas of equal representation.
Evers also pointed out that forcing people to live under the old lines would be especially galling, since those lines “were created as part of the process which resulted in one of the most gerrymandered congressional and legislative seats in the country.”
And Evers ended on a high note, writing: “To deny Wisconsinites from having lawfully reapportioned local districts, even temporarily, is unjust and undemocratic.”
The governor showed excellent leadership with this veto.