Gill v. Whitford, 585 U.S. 48 (2018), was a United States Supreme Court case involving the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering. Other forms of gerrymandering based on racial or ethnic grounds had been deemed unconstitutional, and while the Supreme Court had identified that extreme partisan gerrymandering could also be unconstitutional, the Court had not agreed on how this could be defined, leaving the question to lower courts to decide. That issue was later resolved in Rucho v. Common Cause, in which the Court decided that partisan gerrymanders presented a nonjusticiable political question.
Gill arose following the 2011 redistricting plan for the State of Wisconsin created by Republican legislators to maximize the likelihood that the Republicans would be able to secure additional seats in the State legislature over the next few election cycles. The plan was challenged by Democratic citizens, claiming the redistricting plan caused their votes to be "wasted". The case was filed in 2015, and by 2016, the District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin ruled in favor of the Democrats, based on the evaluation of the efficiency gap measure developed for this case, and ordered Wisconsin to redo its districts by 2017. The State appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court, which heard the case in October 2017.
During the Court's deliberations, it also accepted to hear the merits of another partisan gerrymandering case, Benisek v. Lamone,. related to the 2011 redistricting of Maryland's 6th congressional district, for which it heard oral arguments in March 2018. While the majority of political scientists agree that Wisconsin's map was heavily biased, it was expected that the case would center on whether the efficiency gap measures and other metrics provided by political scientists meet the criteria that Justice Anthony Kennedy set forth in his concurring opinion in Vieth v. Jubelirer (2004), a previous Supreme Court case dealing with partisan gerrymandering.
Ruling on June 18, 2018, the Court remanded the case to lower courts, finding that the plaintiffs had not demonstrated standing for the case in demonstration of harm, though the Justices were split on to what degree the plaintiffs must show "concrete and particularized injuries".
Background In the United States, each state has a number of members of the House of Representatives proportional to the state's population determined by the US Census conducted every ten years under Article One of the United States Constitution, with each state having at least one Representative regardless of its population size. A state that has more than one representative must redistrict after the new census to ensure that each district continues to have an equal number of people. Once set, a voter residing in a specific district may only vote in the Representative election for that district. Many states further use Census data to determine the internal state districts that are used to determine representation in the state government.
The process of redistricting has become highly politicized since redistricting is typically done by the political party that holds the majority of state elected officials. Notably, the practice of gerrymandering, redistricting that draws convoluted district boundaries to favor or disadvantage certain socioeconomic groups, has frequently been used to improve the party's chances of securing elections in the future. Although the US Supreme Court has ruled that redistricting that discriminates on racial or ethnic grounds is unconstitutional, it had been reluctant to issue a similarly-strong ruling for partisan redistricting. The Court has ruled that excessive partisan gerrymandering violates the Constitution. However, the ruling has yet to adopt a standard for determining partisan gerrymandering in redistricting, with proposed tests being too ambiguous for the courts to apply. In the decision for the 2004 case Vieth v. Jubelirer, which ruled that perceived partisan gerrymandering in Pennsylvania was not unconstitutional, the nine Justices were split. The four Justices in the plurality believed that it was impossible to define a standard to judge partisan gerrymandering, and four others could not agree on an existing standard to be used. Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his concurrence with the plurality, believed that some manageable standard for determining partisan gerrymandering could be developed and challenged lower courts to help identify this standard.
Wisconsin redistricting In 2011, Republican legislators in Wisconsin redrew the state Assembly districts based on the latest 2010 census data. This effort was driven by the Republican Party's REDMAP (Redistricting Majority Project) to assure the party had control of the United States House of Representatives and state legislatures, principally through favorable redistricting. The 2011 mapmakers developed a model for evaluating voters' party preferences in aggregate, and drew up spreadsheets identifying likely winners in various proposed districts, labelling these districts as "assertive" or "aggressive" to indicate how likely each was to elect a Republican. They also collaborated with a political science professor, who determined "that Republicans would maintain a majority under any likely voting scenario." Under the "final map," mapmakers determined that "Republicans could expect to win 59 Assembly seats, with 38 safe Republican seats, 14 leaning Republican, 10 swing, 4 leaning Democratic, and 33 safe Democratic seats." The new redistricting map was approved by the State as Act 43, in August 2011. Reflecting this, in the 2012 elections, the Republicans gained 60.6% of the seats in the State Assembly, despite receiving only 48.6% of the statewide vote.
District Court On July 8, 2015, the case was filed with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin arguing that Wisconsin's 2011 state assembly map was unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering favoring the Republican-controlled legislature which discriminated against Democratic voters. The case was filed by the Campaign Legal Center (CLC), representing twelve plaintiffs that were registered Democrats. The lead plaintiff, Professor William Whitford, from University of Wisconsin, stated, "In a democracy citizens are supposed to choose their legislators. In Wisconsin, legislators have chosen their voters." The plaintiffs argued that the map violates the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection. Whitford's complaint specifically claimed that the redrawn maps purposely diluted Democratic voters so that they would be wasted votes (that is, "cracking" the votes) while organizing a small number of districts to pack in a large number of Democratic voters to limit the number of seats the party would win ("packing" the votes). The District Court case was originally filed as Whitford v. Nichol, as Gerald Nicole had been the chairman of the state elections board; he was succeeded by Beverly Gill during the course of the case.
In 2016, a three-judge federal panel allowed the case to proceed to trial, the first time a case regarding gerrymandering has proceeded in three decades. On November 21, 2016, a 2–1 decision declared that the map was unconstitutional.Whitford v. Gill, To assess the validity of the map, the panel developed a three-pronged test that asked if the redistricting [was] intended to place a severe impediment on the effectiveness of the votes of individual citizens on the basis of their political affiliation, (2) has that effect, and (3) cannot be justified on other, legitimate legislative grounds."Whitford, 218 F. Supp. 3d at 884. The panel judged these prongs based on whether they created an entrenchment of power, specifically defined as "making that party—and therefore the state government—impervious to the interests of citizens affiliated with other political parties",Whitford, 218 F. Supp. 3d at 886. which has been the basis for unconstitutional gerrymandering in the past. In the panel, Judge Kenneth Francis Ripple's opinion, joined by Judge Barbara Brandriff Crabb, was that the map worked better than its drafters had hoped. "It secured for Republicans a lasting Assembly majority. It did so by allocating votes among the newly created districts in such a way that, in any likely electoral scenario, the number of Republican seats would not drop below 50%."Whitford, 218 F. Supp. 3d at 898.
The panel also used the Efficiency Gap measure, developed in 2014 by law professor and lead attorney for the plaintiffs Nicholas Stephanopoulos, and political scientist Eric McGhee. Wasted votes and efficiency gap are defined on pp. 850–852. The Efficiency Gap relates the number of wasted votes for each party across the state, with a gaps of 0% equating to a fair distribution. By definition, an Efficiency Gap of more than 7% would have allowed the Republicans to retain their advantage throughout the life of the Act 43 map. The panel determined that the Efficiency Gap was 13% and 10% for the 2012 and 2014 elections, respectively, exceeding the 7% criteria.
Judge William C. Griesbach dissented, believing that there were more appropriate measures they could take to prevent partisan gerrymandering, such as requiring a non-partisan redistricting panel. Griesbach also believed that the entrenchment principle would not be accepted by the Supreme Court over more traditional methods of measuring deviation, and that the use of the relatively new Efficiency Gap measure mischaracterizes the nature of a wasted vote.
The District Court's decision was seen as potentially satisfying the requirements for a test requested by the Supreme Court in Vieth; the three-prong test provided by the Court was able to distinguish between inherent and invidious gerrymandering through the narrowly defined anti-entrenchment principle through the lifetime of the districting map. It also introduced reproducible measurements through the Efficiency Gap that allow biases in redistricting schemes to be quantified.
The panel deferred its ruling on the remedy which was handed down on January 27, 2017.Whitford v. Gill, The District Court ordered the State of Wisconsin to redraw their districts by November 1, 2017, as remedy for the case, using proposals brought by the plaintiffs to guide their decisions.
Supreme Court Appeal The State announced its intentions to appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States following the District Court's ruling in November 2016. Due to special procedures in the Supreme Court involving voters' rights cases, the Supreme Court was required to take the case, though whether they would summarily rule to affirm or reverse, or hear the case in full, would be up to the discretion of the Court. The State asked that the action in the District Court be put on hold until the appeal is decided. The State requested that the Supreme Court overturn the trial court's decision and allow the Legislature to continue drawing its assembly maps. The State was joined through amicus curiae briefs filed by twelve other states led by Texas. Separately, the CLC and its co-counsel from the District Court filed a motion to affirm the District Court's ruling on May 8, 2017.