Politics has always drawn the political map

Back when I was fool enough to run for the state Assembly, this quarter-century ago now, I found myself wandering a stray street in Ashwaubenon, which was weird because I was running for a seat that represented the northwest side of Green Bay and the village of Howard.

Still, the district also included this little string of parcels dipping into Ashwaubenon. When I asked why the map was drawn that way, I learned that the incumbent Democrat state senator lived on that street, and when they redrew the lines after the previous census, they didn’t want to make him move out of “his” district to run for reelection.

That, folks, is a textbook example of gerrymandering, which the Democrats have spent the last decade decrying. The reason they have not been able to get traction with the issue is that everyone who pays attention knows that if Democrats were in power, they would be redrawing the lines with approximately the same guiding principles the Republicans have used.

Is it gerrymandering or simply a matter that people who live in densely packed urban areas tend to vote Democratic, while people who live in more rural areas tend to vote Republican, and Wisconsin is more of a rural state than an urban one?

The difficulty of drawing “fair” lines was illustrated this fall when the redistricting plan submitted by Gov. Tony Evers’ “People’s Maps Commission” was soundly rejected by a bipartisan vote, in part because it managed to reduce the likelihood that Blacks or Hispanics could get elected to the state Legislature.

That’s a no-no under the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits plans that intentionally or inadvertently discriminate on the basis of race, which could dilute the minority vote. Otherwise, the only requirement is that districts be relatively equal in population.

It’s possible to draw lines without regard to politics or personalities; in fact, that’s just what Oconto County did this fall when it adjusted its district borders in accordance with the 2020 census. The county board instructed County Administrator Kevin Hamann to create more or less equally populated districts and to ignore where the incumbent county supervisors live.

The maps Hamann submitted, and the board approved, resulted in five districts with two or more incumbent supervisors and five districts where no incumbent currently lives at all. Bad news for the supervisors who have to decide whether to run against each other, but good news if you like the idea of bringing fresh faces into the process of governing.

Partisans of both major parties have spent entirely too much time accusing the other side of undermining the election process. If the Democrats weren’t complaining about imagined gerrymandering for the last 10 years, they were advancing the conspiracy theory that Russian agents and Donald Trump worked in tandem to steal the 2016 election. Not to be outdone, many Republicans are now advancing the notion that the 2020 election was rigged to steal Trump’s reelection out from under him.

Do they realize how dangerous it is that large numbers of people on both sides of the spectrum don’t trust the published results of the election any more? If we’re all convinced that the election process is that corrupt, how then shall we choose our leaders? I’m not partial to military coups or monarchies, for example.

People in power need to spend less time arguing about boundary lines and counting votes and more time making a case why we should vote for them. The best leaders are those who manage to attract a majority of voters with their ideas, regardless of the perceived party preferences of their constituents.

Warren Bluhm is the editor-in-chief for NEW Media. Readers can contact him at wbluhm@newmedia-wi.com.