Democrats find excuses for election losses in lawsuits

Do Democratic voters have a right to elect a certain number of Democrats to their state legislature? Earlier this week, the Supreme Court heard a critical case that revolves around that question.

Naturally, the plaintiffs would never admit that that's the heart of the matter, but the case really stems from Democrats' frustration at having lost power in so many states since 2010. They were happy with the system of partisan redistricting until they lost control over the process. Now it's a constitutional emergency — a civil rights issue, even.

This case, Gill v. Whitford, made its way to Capitol Hill after a split three-judge panel decided that Wisconsin's state legislative map, drawn in 2011 by Republicans, was unconstitutionally political. Which is to say, the map didn't get enough Democrats elected.

But the reasoning is as full of holes as a Swiss cheese. Judge William Griesbach dissented from the lower court ruling, pointed out first that Wisconsin's map is not even a true gerrymander. Unlike previous maps that have been challenged as too partisan (such as Pennsylvania's congressional map last decade and Indiana's legislative map three decades ago), the maps in this Wisconsin case don't rely on bizarre shapes. Nor do they butcher communities of interest. Nor do they contain districts with widely varying numbers of inhabitants. The Republican map mostly just exploits the fact that Democrats tend to live in clusters that can easily be drawn up into nice, compact districts with lopsided Democratic majorities leaving the rest of state to vote Republican.

This is where the ballyhooed idea of an "efficiency gap" comes in. The lower court's majority allowed the argument that this map can be challenged because it results in Democrats "wasting" too many votes, or winning fewer seats per vote than they could in a system of proportional representation.