sycasey said:
And since Wisconsin has no popular referendum process, the people there are stuck. No way to fix it unless the courts step in.
The Courts have already stepped in:
In 2021, Mr. Evers led an initiative to have a nonpartisan commission create new maps of state legislative districts. The effort failed after the state Supreme Court in April picked a map similar to the 2011 version, which had helped Republicans gain majorities in the state Senate and the state Assembly.
Mr. Evers has made the map a key plank of his re-election campaign. The issue got a surge of media attention after social-media posts of audio from a recent Michels campaign event in which the candidate said, "Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I'm elected governor."
Mr. Evers on Friday released a campaign ad that began with a narrator saying: "Did you know Tim Michels pledged to rig future elections?"
Mr. Michels has repeatedly declined to comment on the remarks and the issue of redistricting. In the past, he pledged to get rid of the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, which administers and enforces voting rules in the state
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In Tight Wisconsin Governor's Race, Gerrymandering Takes Center Stage - WSJBut the redistricting issue is uniquely framed in Wisconsin and has played an integral role in the campaign in a state that has been described by John Johnson, a researcher at Marquette University Law School, as "not one moderate state," but "one very conservative state overlapping another very liberal one."
Redistricting has been a concern since the state's maps were considerably redrawn in 2011 when then-Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, was in office. Those maps, which Democrats at the time contended favored the GOP, were litigated in state and federal courts and eventually at the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to rule on the constitutionality of the maps and sent it back to a district court.
The 2011 maps stayed in place, and Mr. Evers made redistricting an issue in his 2018 campaign for governor. He attempted to put the nonpartisan People's Maps Commission in charge of redistricting to take the process out of the hands of the Wisconsin Legislature.
"All the statewide officials elected are Democrats," which shows Democrats fare well in elections, Mr. Evers said in late October. But about two-thirds of the members of the state Legislature are Republicanwhich he described as "clearly gerrymandering." "Cults don't end well. They really don't."
