Law Prof Althouse Rips NYT Analysis of WI Redistricting Case Before SCOTUS: "Insane"

"Inkblot" is the wrong meme for the gerrymandering problem in the case the Supreme Court is looking at.

The NYT has the headline "Gerrymandering Case Echoes in Inkblot-Like Districts Across the U.S." and the writer — Michael Cooper — gets very far along presenting the problem in terms of the seemingly apparent wrongness of having a sprawling, weirdly shaped legislative district. . .

But the Wisconsin case is just about the opposite problem, as Cooper lets us see in the closing paragraphs of the article. . . 

The problem in Wisconsin is that Democratic voters are concentrated in these compact — not inkblot-like — districts, so that there are "wasted" votes, and Democrats win by wide margins in those places instead of getting their voters spread into some other districts that could become competitive, instead of safe for Republicans. That is, the Democrats are fighting for something more like the Maryland Sixth District. In the new Supreme Court case, the plaintiffs want to "yoke" more Democratic voters in urban areas to Republican voters in more suburban/rural places.

Did the NYT not notice that the article is insane? The problem in the first half is the solution in the second half! You can't have it both ways. Which is kind of why the Supreme Court hasn't figured out what to do with these cases (other than to allow the litigation to proceed, which is some sort of deterrent to the most aggressively partisan gerrymandering).

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