Gerrymandering locks voters out of representative democracy

On Wednesday, Sept. 16, the Wisconsin Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that asks a simple question with enormous stakes: does the Wisconsin Constitution allow incumbent legislators to divvy-up Wisconsin’s eight congressional districts in a way that ensures safe districts for candidates and protects incumbents from being held accountable by voters?

Law Forward is proud to represent Wisconsin Business Leaders for Democracy and a group of Wisconsin voters in our groundbreaking case, WBLD v. Wisconsin Elections Commission. We are asking the court to recognize that our state constitution prohibits something most Wisconsinites already know: our current congressional districts were drawn to protect candidates and incumbents running for re-election by stifling real competition for your vote.

In different kind of gerrymander, both parties win, but voters lose

Most people traditionally associate the word “gerrymandering” with partisan gerrymandering, where one party rigs individual districts or an overall map to favor its candidates and win more seats than it should. But our case is about a different kind of gerrymander that is just as corrosive: congressional districts drawn to protect incumbents of both parties by locking in safe seats.

Imagine a congressional map with four safe Democratic seats and four safe Republican seats, each decided by a landslide. On paper, that appears balanced and fair, at least from a partisan standpoint. In practice, however, it is the result of a backroom deal that shields nearly every candidate and incumbent officeholder from ever having to answer to voters. Both parties win, but voters lose.

This is already happening under Wisconsin’s current congressional map, where district lines were drawn in 2022 to change as little as possible from a map that was itself built a decade earlier to entrench the officeholders already in place.

When the goal is to create continuity for incumbents and pre-ordain the result of elections for congressional representatives rather than to require candidates to run on the issues, responsiveness to voters, policy positions, character, and fitness for office, accountability to constituents vanishes. An anti-competitive gerrymander discourages challengers from running and voters from voting, as incumbents become more beholden to lobbyists, national political parties, and donors than to everyday people.

Wisconsin’s Constitution does not allow that. The very first article of our state’s constitution states unequivocally that the government “derives its just powers from the consent of the governed.” The framers also wrote that the “blessings of a free government” must be secured for the people.

Those are not abstract phrases. They are promises that Wisconsin’s elections and its citizens’ right to vote have real meaning and that the people in office must keep earning their jobs from one election to the next. Engineering a map so that outcomes are locked in before Election Day breaks those promises to Wisconsin voters, no matter which party benefits.

We are not asking court to maximize competition

Some defenders of the current map argue that recognizing this kind of claim would drag courts into deciding how many “competitive” districts Wisconsin should have and that judges would be picking winners just as much as the people drawing the maps. That gets it backwards. We are not asking the court to maximize competition or to hit some arbitrary target.

We are asking the court to compare Wisconsin’s map to what would happen if mapmakers followed the state’s own redistricting rules honestly. If a district would naturally lean heavily in favor of one party’s candidate once population equality and any other criteria are properly applied, our case would not ask the court to override the legislature’s choices in drawing that district. Only when mapmakers override the neutral rules to insulate incumbents or specific candidates from challengers is our state constitution’s promise of accountable government is broken.

It is also worth noting how this case got to the Wisconsin Supreme Court. We filed our complaint under a statute the legislature and then-Gov. Scott Walker enacted 15 years ago specifically for redistricting cases like ours. A panel of three circuit court judges, appointed by the Wisconsin Supreme Court as that law requires, considered the case before their decision dismissing the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. This is the process Wisconsin built for exactly this kind of dispute.

Whatever our personal politics, we should be able to agree on this much: elections for congressional and state legislative districts are supposed to be decided by voters in those districts, not by the legislators who seek to represent them drawing the district boundaries to ensure they prevail in elections. Our state constitution requires as much. When a legislature draws maps built to protect its own members rather than to give the public a genuine choice about who will represent them in the U.S. Congress, it isn’t practicing representative democracy. It’s locking voters out of it.

By Doug Poland, Director of Litigation. Originally published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on September 16, 2026.