Court’s Redistricting Experts Under Fire

Clarke Petitioners’ Assembly Map

It has to be the funniest quote so far in the ongoing wrestling match over redistricting. After the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s expert consultants released a report declaring the maps proposed by Republican legislators and the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) were partisan gerrymanders, WILL president Rick Esenberg released a statement declaring that “The report hides its bias behind a fog of faux sophistication.”

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Esenberg’s press release is a fog of fancy words blasting what he goes on to call “social science gobbledygook,” while offering no specifics on what is wrong with consultant’s report.

Probably because it’s so obvious that the maps submitted by Republicans and WILL are massively tilted in favor of Republicans as an analysis by Urban Milwaukee’s Data Wonk columnist found, using data from the respected website Dave’s Redistricting. In fact, even the maps submitted by Gov. Tony Evers, Senate Democrats and other Democratic leaning groups gave a 1% to 4% edge for Republicans.

Which leaves Republicans trying to find some other way to discredit the court’s experts, who have volunteered to draw their own maps “to improve performance on most or all of the Court mandated criteria…we are poised to produce it quickly.”

Imagine a map that was completely neutral and gave zero advantage to either party. That would be a nightmare for Wisconsin Republicans, who have long enjoyed one of the most gerrymandered maps in the nation.

And the court’s two experts, University of California, Irvine political scientist Bernard Grofman and Carnegie Mellon University political scientist Jonathan Cervas, are just the guys to deliver such a map.

In New York Cervas was hired in 2022 by state Supreme Court Justice Patrick F. McAllister, a Republican, as a special master to create new maps to replace a gerrymandered map that favored Democrats. The map ultimately drawn by Cervas left Democrats fulminating about the result while the right-wing editorial board of the Wall Street Journal reacted in glee declaring that  “special master…Jonathan Cervas, isn’t a partisan hack.”

Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries blasted Cervas, declaring “The unelected, out-of-town special master did a terrible job, produced an unfair map that did great violence to Black and Latino communities throughout the city.”

Cervas noted that “The final plan that the court approved has more majority-minority districts than the unconstitutional one that Democrats had passed in the legislature.”

“I serve the court, I serve democracy. That’s it,” Cervas added.

And this is one of the two experts Esenberg has accused of pushing a “partisan outcome” favoring Democrats.

Cervas had previously served as a consultant for Pennsylvania’s Legislative Reapportionment Commission, where his work drew criticism from both Democrats and Republicans for reducing the electoral power of officials in both parties. The commission’s chairman, Mark Nordenberg, the former chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, told the New York Times that Cervas “approached everything we did in a fair and nonpartisan fashion,” and proved invaluable as a redistricting specialist, with “a deep knowledge of the law” and “technical, mapping skills.”

Cervas has also worked on line-redrawing cases in Utah, Georgia and Virginia and is “a well-respected academic who’s been known across the country for his nonpartisan, quality work,” said New York Law School’s Jeffrey M. Wice. “He does not work for any partisan interests,” he told Bloomberg News.

Cervas was actually a protege of his fellow expert, receiving his Ph.D. at UC-Irvine where Grofman was his adviser. Cervas went on to teach at Carnegie Mellon University, and the two have published research together and Cervas assisted Grofman on other map-drawing cases.

Grofman has drawn remedial redistricting plans for four federal courts as the Special Master and has testified as an expert in numerous redistricting cases. He has been particularly busy in Virginia: In 2015, he was appointed as a special master to redraw the state’s congressional districts after US federal judges ruled the previous districts were unconstitutionally gerrymandered to dilute the influence of Black voters. In 2018, Grofman was again appointed as a special master, this time to redraw the state legislative districts. And in 2021, as the issue was again disputed, he was one of two experts hired to redraw both state and federal districts in Virginia, who created a plan upheld by the Virginia Supreme Court.

In January three federal judges appointed Grofman as one of two special masters to help redraw 13 Detroit-area districts for the State House and Senate that were deemed illegally influenced by race.

“Republicans have their crop of experts, and there’s also a core of experts who routinely testify for the Democrats,” noted Robert Byer, who served on Pennsylvania’s redistricting commission, in a story by Hope Karnopp. “And there’s a small number of experts in this area who are nonpartisan, and Dr. Cervas and Dr. Grofman both are in that category.”

All of which has left Republicans in Wisconsin complaining about the redistricting process, arguing they should be allowed to cross-examine the court’s two experts — or else the Supreme Court should throw out their report.

In response, Dan Lenz, Staff Counsel for Law Forward, the liberal law firm pushing for fair maps, accused the Republicans of sour grapes. “The Court has given the Legislature every opportunity to submit constitutional maps that comply with basic redistricting criteria,” Lenz told Urban Milwaukee. “They have chosen not to and are now lashing out at the Court’s well-qualified, nationally respected consultants.”