The case to be heard on Tuesday, Gill v. Whitford, could settle that debate once and for all. Advertisement Continue reading the main storyIn the Wisconsin case, the plaintiffs — a band of Democrats backed by local lawyers and an advocacy group, the Campaign Legal Center — seek to expand the one-person-one-vote principle to partisan gerrymanders. The court itself has agreed that some partisan gerrymanders could violate the Equal Protection Clause. The plaintiffs in the Wisconsin case prevailed in Federal District Court last year in part by offering a new data-driven yardstick for partisanship, the efficiency gap. Using that metric to compare the Republican map of the Wisconsin Assembly with nearly every other state redistricting plan from 1972 to 2014, the plaintiffs deemed the Wisconsin plan more partisan than all but four others.

Source: New York Times October 01, 2017 20:34 UTC