The decision could prompt challenges to school district and Milwaukee city council boundaries.
Wisconsin will likely face limited immediate impact at both the legislative and congressional level from the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that narrowed how the Voting Rights Act can be used to challenge political maps. But it may make it easier for people to challenge school board and city council maps in court.
The ruling in Louisiana v. Callais raises the bar for voting rights challenges by requiring stronger evidence that race, rather than political considerations, drove how districts were drawn, and making it easier for states to defend maps on nonracial grounds.
Dan Lennington, the managing vice president and deputy counsel at the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, said the boundaries that could be most easily struck down as a result of the Wednesday ruling are those that were drawn explicitly for racial reasons. Some examples, he said, are the boundaries for Milwaukee city council districts and certain school districts.
Race is a common factor in drawing Milwaukee city council districts, though campaigns to add additional majority-minority districts haven’t always succeeded.
For example, departing Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in December 2021 vetoed a proposed city council map because it didn’t include a third Latino-majority district, only for Mayor Cavalier Johnson to sign that same map several weeks later.
Lennington also pointed to state laws that use race as a factor to determine school district boundaries. One of those laws explicitly mentions “racial composition of the pupils” as a factor for drawing boundaries — a law that he said is now implicated by the Callais decision.
“If a plaintiff comes to us and says that they live in a district that’s been racially gerrymandered, we would take a very close look at that case,” he said.
Less likely impact on legislative and congressional level
There likely won’t be much impact in Wisconsin at the congressional district level because there’s just one majority-minority district in the state, UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said ahead of the ruling. The 4th Congressional District, represented by Rep. Gwen Moore, D-Milwaukee, comprises much of Milwaukee and the surrounding suburbs in Milwaukee County.
Even if Section 2 of the VRA did not apply, he said, the district would likely stay much the same given the general principle of keeping communities intact.
A decision like the one handed down, he said, “would open the door if line drawers wanted to break up that county or city in some way, but I think it would probably be challenged on other grounds.”
Challenges to Wisconsin’s congressional maps have often had more to do with partisan than racial line-drawing. Speaking to reporters on Wednesday, Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, said he wasn’t surprised by the federal decision but reiterated his call for new congressional maps, which he said unfairly gave Republicans a 6-2 seat advantage in a swing state.
But two recent court decisions in Wisconsin rejected challenges to the state’s congressional maps on the basis that they constitute an unconstitutional “anti-competitive” gerrymander. Those rulings focused not on race, but on whether courts can take up claims based on partisan advantage.
Doug Poland, co-founder of the liberal law firm Law Forward, said this ruling could empower lawmakers to pursue partisan goals while making racial challenges harder to prove.
But because of Wisconsin’s demographics — a largely white state, with the most significant minority populations concentrated around the Milwaukee area — the state has run into Section 2 challenges far less often than southern states, he said.
“As a practical matter, this decision doesn’t have a big impact on Wisconsin at the moment,” he said. “That could change.”
There’s more at play among state legislative districts, Burden said. The state has nine majority-minority legislative districts, where a single minority group makes up over half of the population: seven in the Assembly and two in the Senate. Two other districts — one in each chamber — are minority influence districts, where combined minority populations make up a majority.
Democrats in Wisconsin have generally steered clear of breaking up minority districts to avoid violating the VRA, Burden said, but packing minority voters in one district sometimes costs them adjacent districts where they might have been competitive if the minority population was more evenly distributed. For that reason, there’s a history of Republicans supporting majority-minority districts in the state.
The issue has been a factor in recent redistricting fights. In March 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court initially selected Evers’ legislative maps, which created an additional majority-Black Assembly district.
But while Evers argued this addition was necessary to comply with the Voting Rights Act, it drew criticism from both sides of the aisle. A Black Democratic legislator criticized the move as diluting Black voices, while Republicans appealed the maps to the U.S. Supreme Court, which sided with the GOP and ordered the Wisconsin Supreme Court to select a different map.
If any of the districts are found to be out of compliance with the U.S. Constitution under the ruling via some additional challenge, Burden said, Wisconsin may draw new districts sooner than later.
“I don’t know who that advantages,” he said. “It probably depends who’s drawing the lines.”
Lennington also pointed out President Donald Trump’s success with Black and Latino voters relative to past GOP candidates, adding that splitting majority-minority legislative districts wouldn’t necessarily give either party an advantage here.
What he did predict, though, is that splitting such districts “might polarize us even more” if they were replaced with districts drawn on partisan as opposed to racial lines.
“It just might make the red more red and the blue more blue,” he said.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at [email protected].
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.
This article first appeared on Wisconsin Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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