The Supreme Court declared Monday that it will consider whether gerrymandered election maps favoring one political party over another violate the Constitution, a potentially fundamental change in the way American elections are conducted.
The justices regularly are called to invalidate state electoral maps that have been illegally drawn to reduce the influence of racial minorities by depressing the impact of their votes.
But the Supreme Court has never found a plan unconstitutional because of partisan gerrymandering. If it does, it would have a revolutionary impact on the reapportionment that comes after the 2020 election and could come at the expense of Republicans, who control the process in the majority of states.
The court accepted a case from Wisconsin, where a divided panel of three federal judges last year ruled last year that the stateâs Republican leadership in 2011 pushed through a plan so partisan that it violated the Constitutionâs First Amendment and equal rights protections.
The issue will be briefed and argued in the Supreme Court term that begins in October.
The justices gave themselves a bit of an out: They said they will further consider their jurisdiction over the case when it is heard on its merits.
And they gave an indication of how divisive the issue might be: after granting the case, the court voted 5 to 4 to stay the lower courtâs decision, which had required new districts be drawn this fall. Wisconsin had argued that would create unnecessary work should the Supreme Court ultimately overturn the lower courtâs decision.
The liberal justicesâRuth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kaganâwent on record saying they would have denied the stay, meaning that the courtâs five conservatives granted it.
The courtâs action comes at a time when the relatively obscure subject of reapportionment has taken on new significance, with many blaming the drawing of safely partisan seats for a polarized and gridlocked Congress. Former president Barack Obama has said that one of his post-presidency projects will be to combat partisan gerrymanders after the 2020 Census.
Both parties draw congressional and legislative districts to their own advantage â a challenge to a congressional plan drawn by Maryland Democrats is making its way through the courts.
But Republicans have more to lose because they control so many more state legislatures. The Republican National Committee and a dozen large Republican states have asked the court to reverse the Wisconsin decision.
That stateâs legislative leaders asked the Supreme Court in their brief to reject any effort that âwrests control of districting away from the state legislators to whom the state constitution assigns that task, and hands it to federal judges and opportunistic plaintiffs seeking to accomplish in court what they failed to achieve at the ballot box.â
But the dozen plaintiffs â voters across the state â said the evidence laid out in a trial in the Wisconsin case showed that âRepublican legislative leaders authorized a secretive and exclusionary mapmaking process aimed at securing for their party a large advantage that would persist no matter what happened in future elections.â
In the election after adoption of the new maps, Republicans got just 48.6 percent of the statewide vote, but captured a 60-to-39 seat advantage in the State Assembly.
The head of a group representing the plaintiffs in the Wisconsin case welcomed the courtâs decision to consider it.
âThe threat of partisan gerrymandering isnât a Democratic or Republican issue; itâs an issue for all American voters,â said Trevor Potter, president of the Campaign Legal Center, and former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission. âAcross the country, weâre witnessing legislators of both parties seizing power from voters in order to advance their purely partisan purposes. Weâre confident that when the justices see how pervasive and damaging this practice has become, the Supreme Court will adopt a clear legal standard that will ensure our democracy functions as it should.â
The Supreme Court has been reluctant to tackle partisan gerrymandering and sort through arguments about whether an electoral system is rigged or, instead, a partyâs political advantage is because of changing attitudes and demographics, as Wisconsin Republicans contend.
The justices last took up the topic in 2004 in a case called Vieth v. Jubelirer. It split the court five different ways, with the bottom line being that the justices could not agree on a test to determine when normal political instincts such as protecting your own turned into an unconstitutional dilution of someone elseâs vote.
Four justices â only Justice Clarence Thomas remains of the group â said it was not the courtâs business to make such decisions. Four others â only Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer remain â said such challenges could be heard by the court but disagreed on the method.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy was in the middle. He joined the first group to decide the specific case against the challengers of a Pennsylvania redistricting plan, but he left the door open for future cases.
Kennedy said he could envision a successful challenge âwhere a state enacts a law that has the purpose and effect of subjecting a group of voters or their party to disfavored treatment.â What was elusive, Kennedy said, was âa manageable standard by which to measure the effect of the apportionment and so to conclude that the state did impose a burden or restriction on the rights of a partyâs voters.â
In the Wisconsin case, plaintiffs pushed a plan called the âefficiency gapâ to determine how Republican mapmakers hurt Democrats with the main tools of gerrymandering: âpackingâ and âcracking.â These refer to packing like-minded voters, such as supporters of the same party, into a limited number of districts or cracking their influence by scattering them across districts in numbers too small to make an impact.
Under the approach, developed by two University of Chicago professors, every voter packed into a district above the threshold needed to elect a candidate from his party creates a âsurplusâ vote. And someone in a cracked district, who votes for a candidate that is unable to win, is a âlostâ vote. Surplus and lost votes are considered wasted votes.
The efficiency gap measures the difference between the wasted votes of the two parties in an election divided by the total number of votes cast.
The Wisconsin court was not so definitive. It acknowledged the efficiency gap, but only as one of several theories the court said corroborated its findings that the Republican leadership had a discriminatory intent, that its plan had a discriminatory effect and that the state had no legitimate reason for drawing the districts in the way it did.
The state contends that while Wisconsin is a purple state in national elections, its geography favors Republicans in legislative elections. Democratic voters are clustered in cities such as Milwaukee and Madison, while Republican voters are more evenly spread across the state. Any method of drawing districts will favor Republicans, they contend.
Before 2011, the last two electoral maps were drawn by federal judges after the legislature was unable to reach agreement. Under both, the state maintains, Republicans gained majorities in the legislature in excess of their proportion of the statewide vote.