The court has said that too much partisanship in map drawing is illegal, but it has never said how much is too much. Oral arguments are scheduled at 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, July 18, before the Kansas Supreme Court.
In 2004, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a partisan gerrymander in Pennsylvania was constitutional and that it was not within the purview of the court to strike it down. That happened before in 2006-2007, he added.
"As I have said before, our redistricting process was entirely lawful and constitutional, and the district court should be reversed", Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel said.
A dozen Wisconsin Democratic Party voters filed suit in 2015 against state election officials over the redistricting, saying the Republican-backed plan divided Democratic voters in some areas and packed them in others in order to dilute their electoral clout and benefit Republican candidates.
That state's legislative leaders asked the Supreme Court in their brief to reject any effort that "wrests 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".
The Supreme Court has never struck down districts because of unfair partisan advantage, although it has intervened frequently in disputes over race and redistricting over the past 50 years. But the court was silent on whether to delay the drawing of new state Assembly district boundaries as ordered by a lower court panel.
The non-partisan redistricting and the state's top-two primary system have led to more-competitive races, some even pitting members of the same party against one another. Similar lawsuits are pending in Maryland, where Democrats dominate, and North Carolina, where Republicans have a huge edge in the congressional delegation and the state legislature. "In the long term, it would help to assure that districting as a whole would be more likely to represent the interest of the voters and the jurisdiction as a whole". Four others-only Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer remain-said such challenges could be heard by the court but disagreed on the method.
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Meanwhile, dozens of people erupted into Kensington and Chelsea town hall to protest the lack of response following the fire. The deadly blaze has mushroomed into a political crisis, testing the fragile government of Prime Minister Theresa May .
Controlling both the governor's mansion and the state legislature in 2011, Wisconsin Republican lawmakers used extremely precise technology to secretly draw electoral maps that benefited their party. In 2014, the party garnered 52 percent of the vote and 63 state Assembly seats.
"Wisconsin's gerrymander was one of the most aggressive of the decade, locking in a large and implausibly stable majority for Republicans in what is otherwise a battleground state", said redistricting expert Thomas Wolf of the Brennan Center.
The federal court that struck down the districts adopted an equation that offers a way to measure the partisan nature of the districts.
The measure, call the efficiency gap, shows how cracking (breaking up blocs of Democratic voters) and packing (concentrating Democrats within certain districts) results in wasted votes - excess votes for winners in safe districts and perpetually inadequate votes for the losers.
The measurement could appeal to Justice Anthony Kennedy, who has said he is willing to referee claims of excessively partisan redistricting, but only if the court can find a workable way to do so.
Voters in Georgia's 6th congressional district head to the polls Tuesday to vote in a special election between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel. Until now, he hasn't found one.
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