One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

by Carol Anderson

The efficiency gap is, however, only one component.64 Other tests must be used in conjunction with it to verify those findings. First, is there a durable partisan effect, such as Wisconsin undergoing three elections in which the Republicans’ vote gains were not overwhelming but their share of the number of seats in the General Assembly continued to grow. The next part of the standard is intent to seek a partisan edge. When Wisconsin’s GOP took a small cabal to an off-site room, worked away at the maps for four months, excluded every Democrat from the process, and required nondisclosure agreements from their Republican colleagues before they could be shown their own districts, intent had been more than established. To be clear, unitary party control of the government apparatus—both houses of the legislature and the governor’s office—is usually an essential condition of intent. Finally, if the districts do not meet previous constitutional standards, such as being compact, contiguous, and within established political subdivisions, but instead begin to take on the shape of a bug splattered against a windshield or are joined together only during low tide, something could be awry.65 None of these alone will suffice, but combined they spell out democracy’s SOS. The district court weighed the evidence, assessed the arguments, evaluated the efficiency gap’s reliability and validity, and parsed through the other standards and how they strengthened the judiciary’s ability to determin...