POLITICS/SUPREME COURT: “The U.S. Supreme Court has never declared a voting-district map unconstitutional for giving one party a political edge, but a pair of legal scholars hopes a metric they devised will change that.
On Monday [6-19-17], the high court announced it would hear the appeal of a U.S. District Court decision that invalidated the Wisconsin state assembly district map for being unconstitutionally partisan.
A foundation of the original complaint is a mathematical formula known as the efficiency gap that measures the impact of partisan gerrymandering.
If the Supreme Court concludes the Wisconsin plan is unconstitutional—as it has racially gerrymandered maps that watered down the influence of minorities—the efficiency gap could become part of a legal test that would change the way states draw district boundaries.
‘The hope is that in the future there would be a judicial limit to how extreme partisan gerrymandering could be,’ said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a lawyer for the plaintiffs and a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who helped craft the metric.”
-Jo Craven McGinty, “Formula Measures Impact of Partisan Gerrymandering,” The Wall Street Journal online, June 23, 2017 09:00am