I teach Political Geography in the Wisconsin state college system, and I have the students do a GIS-based Wisconsin redistricting exercise. I’ll next teach it next fall — let’s hope by then the actual map is less gerrymandered than the current one.
Ooh, sign me up!
That’s kind of you. We’re over in La Crosse, though. 
Just keep voting! (And, if you have time, consider getting trained to be an election “inspector,” as we call pollworkers in Wisconsin).
How do the students react when they see the differences between districts as is and what they come up with?
They learn about gerrymandering before they do the exercise. About half the students didn’t know about gerrymandering beforehand — and most of those are indeed miffed (but I wouldn’t say “surprised” — anyone born this century is too young to really remember functional governance).
In the exercise, they find out how challenging it is to fit my criteria: about same population in each district; two the eight districts are competitive, three likely D, three likely R; and one must have at least 30% minority by race (a “community of interest”). They assign counties to start, then for Milwaukee city have to go down to the census tract level.
You gave me a great idea — to have them do the exercise BEFORE (some of them) learn about gerrymanding. Thanks!
Cool! The results should be interesting.
For extra credit, have a couple of the brighter ones do a “you cut, I choose” exercise.
FYI, there’s a bunch of resources for studying gerrymandering at the MGGG Redistricting Lab site.
It is fairly math heavy so it’s not appropriate for all students, but I think there’s some top down view stuff that might be accessible to general audiences.
The project head at MGGG is Dr. Moon Duchin, a math professor who has done a lot work in this area. Here’s a paper she wrote on how to even measure gerrymandering and one of the motivating examples is the state of Wisconsin… https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.02064.pdf
Good idea. (And, thanks to Lance Turbo for that info and link).
I use the ESRI (ArcGIS) tool, which requires a license (link below).
There’s a simple, free game the New York Times created in January 2022 — more of a hypothetical exercise, best for middle or high school students, probably.
@Qadgop_the_Mercotan (You are doing plenty, of course — tending to the ill among our incarcerated is a noble and democratic-with-a-small-d task. I’m being serious here.)
Irony much?
Is taking partisan results into account a part of the map-drawing process generally, or is that part of your teaching process?
Wickard v Filburn? I agree that was a bad decision but I don’t see how it applies here.
My understanding is that the WI SC will not take into account partisanship when drawing new districts. As I said somewhere upthread, they’ll likely have a special master draw the new maps and he’ll likely be instructed not to take that into consideration.
Generally, “avoiding gerrymandering” means “helping to make it likely – though not necessarily inevitable – that the proportion of legislators from each party will tend to be pretty close to the party proportions in the overall popular vote.”
Wisconsin’s popular votes in most elections in recent years have been very close to 50-50, so those that value fairness would agree the legislators should reflect this (or at least have a good chance of doing so).
BUT…those who support democracy ALSO don’t want every district’s results to be inevitable. Some districts should be truly competitive; otherwise, many potential voters could give up on the whole system, feeling (rightly so) their vote doesn’t matter.
In the assignment the distribution of “three likely D, three likely R, two competitive” was my choice, but it does reflect the kind of compromise I’ve seen others promote, including in official capacities like state supreme court decisions and bipartisan advisory panels.
I hope your class results in some of the students coming to the realization that multi-member districts and proportional representation are the solution to our gerrymandering woes.
Probably not the solution to our gerrymandering woes, because I think that US courts have ruled multi-member districts to be unconstitutional.
I’m think it’s a federal statute, not a court ruling, that requires single-member districts.
Note that, even for the less-competitive districts, I asked students to create ones that merely lean toward one party or the other. The idea is that, even in these, the candidate from the less-favored party would have some hope of winning, and would present their case to the voters. The “marketplace of ideas” wouldn’t be entirely shut down in these districts.
You are correct. The Uniform Congressional District Act of 1967 requires that states use single-member districts for their Congressional apportionment. A CRS report with background on the issue can be found here. Prior to this, there were states that had multimember districts or statewide at-large elections.