Wisconsin Watch Media Partners Center (https://partners.wisconsinwatch.org/tag/redistricting/)
Most counties have approved resolutions calling for fairer way to redraw electoral districts; does Iowa offer an effective model?
Justices consider: When does partisanship cross the line?
In the 2012 election, Republicans increased their control of the state Legislature despite getting substantially fewer total votes than Democrats. This was done, Mayer said, by packing Democrats into safe districts while creating a slight edge for Republicans in many more.
In some newsrooms, reporters and editors fondly welcome odd-numbered years.
That’s because these are election-lite: No races for president, governor, attorney general or the state Legislature. No glut of partisan candidates trying to open new orifices in each other’s anatomies. Hooray.
But in covering a beat like money and politics, there is no break in the action. A glance back through a year’s worth of weekly columns confirms it.
Wisconsin’s last redistricting, after the 2010 Census, was done in secret and cost taxpayers more than $2 million. Ruling Republicans strategically carved districts to maximize their electoral prospects, much as Democrats would had done had they been able.
In the aftermath of the Nov. 6 elections, words like “fickle” and “schizophrenic” are being bandied about to describe the Wisconsin electorate, which chose a Democratic president but more Republicans for Congress and the state Legislature. A Center analysis shows that the vote tallies in Wisconsin’s congressional and state legislative races were not nearly as lopsided as the parties’ resulting share of seats — and election observers attribute this to the Republicans’ redistricting efforts in 2011.
Wisconsin receives a C- in a nationwide ranking of states’ accountability and risk of corruption. The State Integrity Investigation, released today, ranks Wisconsin 22nd, with a score of 70 percent — a score boosted by the creation in 2008 of the state Government Accountability Board to help clean up government.
The backdrop for many of Wisconsin’s current ethical controversies is an unprecedented flow of money into the state’s political machinery. With last year’s Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case, some loopholes in the state’s campaign finance laws have grown even wider.
The Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council is bestowing its annual “Opee” Awards for openness in government. And Wisconsin state lawmakers have been tapped for both kinds of awards — good as well as bad.
It’s time once again for proponents of open government and the free flow of information to celebrate Sunshine Week. But this year, we’ll be doing it under a cloud.
By now, the notion that outside special interests drive the political process is so widely accepted as to be almost a cliche. Yet when it comes to the hot-button state political issue of redistricting, the process appears driven not by outside special interests but an inside one: the Legislature itself.