Milwaukee Fights for Representation in a Bitter Redistricting Year

A vein trailing east from I-41, North Avenue stretches from Milwaukee’s western suburbs, through the heart of the city, and all the way to the shoreline of Lake Michigan.

In Wauwatosa, the street is lined with office buildings defined by sharp lines and modern exteriors cut into precise rectangles, their olive-tone sheens too new to be dulled by the sun. Manicured landscaping is browned by a late November chill. A Radisson and Walgreens puncture the suburban stillness of a newly minted business district.

Community organizer Sheila Smith is driving a teenaged passenger through the suburbs, to his home on the northwest side of Milwaukee, and he keeps asking the same question.

“Where are we?”

“We’re on North Avenue,” she answers every time.

The modern buildings bleed into a residential stretch. Brick rectangles of single-family homes grow into old Colonials divided into apartments. Next come expansive, two-story houses with large yards and ornate bay windows.

“This is not the North Avenue I am used to seeing,” the teen finally says.

Smith understands what he means. She works with the Northwest Side Community Development Corporation, a neighborhood group focused on economic development.

“Let’s think about it—where is your North Avenue and where do we see the beautiful trees and the beautiful houses and clean streets as we get closer to your house?” Smith asks him.

As North Avenue continues into Milwaukee, yards and grassy spaces between sidewalks and road are replaced with concrete, cracks radiating out in every direction. Scuffed brick buildings and weather-worn signs sit side by side. Where North Avenue intersects Sherman Boulevard, fluorescent murals of a child’s building blocks cover the boarded-up windows of an empty storefront. Discarded masks, crumpled fast food cups and forgotten wrappers join the drying leaves at the edge of the road.

“Where do we see dilapidated buildings?” Smith says. “There’s no place to go shopping, no place to play, no pool, none of [that here]. So, let’s be clear, your whole North Avenue could look like this, but there are choices that have been made about disinvesting in certain neighborhoods.”

Even along the same street, community resources are tied to the influence of local and state representatives whose voting districts get hashed out every ten years. Again in 2021, it’s all about redistricting—all about the maps.

People of color often get the short end of the stick, and we don’t want to lose representation.

Rep. LaKeshia Myers (D-Milwaukee)

Sheila Smith and her fellow community organizers, Danitra Jones and Raymond Monk from Northwest Side Community Development Corporation have been watching the 2021 map drawing process closely. They know that how a district is drawn can determine how much of a voice communities have.

“Some of the proposed maps separate and divide the numbers of people who have a commonality of lifestyle,” Monk said. “A large strength of our district is that the majority of the people live similar lives. They have a lot of the same interests, and that’s really where the power lies. When you take that away, you kind of weaken the voice of a community.”

What is redistricting?

As required by Wisconsin’s State Constitution, voting districts are drawn every decade following the US Census. This is done to ensure the voting districts accurately reflect shifts in the state’s demographics. Currently, based on 2011 Census data, Wisconsin has 33 Senate districts and 99 Assembly districts.

A voting district encompasses a group of people in a geographic region organized into an electoral unit. Each district gets one representative, who helps decide where funding goes and ideally protects the community’s interests.

In Wisconsin, the process of drawing new maps, or redistricting, is handled by the Legislature, which means politicians are designing the maps that help or hurt their own election chances.  The maps must pass through both the state Senate and Assembly before heading to the Governor, who has the power to veto or sign the maps into law.

The maps drawn by the Legislature were passed by the Senate and Assembly, which both have a GOP majority, in early November. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed the maps on Nov. 18.

The fate of the maps is now in the hands of the Wisconsin State Supreme Court. It could be weeks or months before the Court makes a final ruling.

Representation matters in Milwaukee

According to 2020 Census data, the northwest side of Milwaukee is predominantly African American, and various proposed maps divide that part of the city into about six state Senate voting districts. This includes State Sen. Lena Taylor’s district, largely African American, which has caused concerns for community advocates.

“There’s a certain bias that sort of reveals itself in the drawing of these districts that tend to, instead of empowering people to utilize their political power, it actually tends to disenfranchise people,” Smith said. “It makes people feel like they’re not a part of the decision-making process. It tends to lead towards a greater sense of hopelessness in terms of being able to assert your request to the government and be a part of the of this democracy.”

However, the three NWSCDC organizers, each responsible for helping communities of about 9,400 people, say few people understand or engage in the redistricting process.

Many older residents are engaged in politics, but the organizers struggle to connect with people ages 18-30, Jones said. Only about 50% of the 76.1 million Americans aged 18-34 voted in 2020, according to the United States Elections Project.

“We do have those resident leaders who are more engaged and knowledgeable and keep up with those things, but for the most part, people are attending to their day-to-day,” Smith said. “They’re just trying to make sure that kids get to school because they have a job to go to, so they can pay their bills. That kind of thing.”

All three organizers said there was little engagement from the other side of the ballot as well—not enough representatives were taking the time to meet with the community. To make up for the lack of information, the NWSCDC holds in-person and virtual town halls to keep their neighborhoods informed.

It’s hard for average citizens to become involved in a process that’s so hard to understand, especially when they have pressing, daily struggles, Jones said.

What makes up a district?

The process of creating districts is complicated. Many factors must be considered when the maps are drawn.

According to a 2020 guidebook released by the Legislature, there are five main criteria districts must meet: equal population, compactness, contiguity, protection of groups of interest and respect for existing political boundaries.

Every voting district should have roughly the same population—which means within a .1% difference in Wisconsin—to ensure every vote carries the same weight. If the population was uneven, voters in sparsely populated districts would have more political power than those in densely populated ones.

Compactness refers to the idea that members of a district should live reasonably close to each other. A 2016 study by the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau found “there is no generally agreed upon standard of compactness as it applies to redistricting other than common sense.”

For a district to be contiguous, it must be connected. A district cannot consist of two separate parts.

Communities that have similar economic, racial, ethnic or political backgrounds and goals are often considered groups of interests. However, they do not have an official legal definition, making it a challenging criterion to assess.

Respecting existing political boundaries means that voting districts are often drawn along county or municipal borders. A Milwaukee assembly district is likely to stop at the Milwaukee County line instead of creeping into Racine County.

The criteria were designed to create fair maps and ensure Wisconsin’s voting outcomes are equitable. The maps can be measured for equity by their vote share—did the candidate with the most votes win the election and did the political party with the most votes gain the majority? When these things do not line up, the district maps have usually been gerrymandered, with the intent of creating a specific outcome.

This is what happened to the Wisconsin district maps drawn in 2011.

Gerrymandering in Wisconsin

Before the start of the redistricting process in 2011, something unusual happened in Wisconsin politics: Republicans controlled both branched of the Legislature and the governor’s office. Wisconsin has long been considered a purple state, roughly an equal mixture of Democrats and Republicans.

The total party control allowed Republicans to create maps behind closed doors, without public input, in a private law firm and passed by then Gov. Scott Walker with little resistance.

“Those maps actually created a huge advantage for the Republican Party,” said Hong Min Park, a UW-Milwaukee associate professor of political science. “The current process of partisan gerrymandering, especially in Wisconsin, is very problematic and very undemocratic.”

Gerrymandering is when political or electoral districts are drawn with the purpose of giving one political group an advantage over another, according to Cornell Law’s Legal Information Institute.  This can be done in two ways: packing and cracking voters into districts.

Packing is when many members of a specific group, often a political party, are clustered in a small number of districts, resulting in often overwhelming electoral wins. However, large wins in a handful of districts result in few representatives for the party.

Cracking occurs when the same group is spread out across multiple districts, typically given less than 50% of the vote, according to the Princeton Gerrymandering Project. This, like with the practice of packing, results in the party or group receiving few representatives.

Gerrymandering is a bipartisan practice—there have been documented cases of Democrats in Illinois, Oregon and New York drawing maps that advantaged them. Both Republicans and Democrats, have and do use gerrymandering. However, in Wisconsin, the district maps were gerrymandered to favor Republican candidates.

Park, who studies partisan politics, said the gerrymandering of the maps becomes evident when the vote share, the percentage of votes compared to seats won by political parties, is evaluated.

“We should look at the 2012 election, the first election after the 2011 redistricting in Wisconsin,” Park said. “If we look at the State Assembly, Republican Party received around 48 percent of the vote share, which is not the majority, but around 60% of Assembly members were elected from the Republican Party. There was a huge over representation there.”

During 2012 congressional races, 49% of the 2.9 million votes cast went to Republicans, according to analysis by Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism. However, five out of eight times, or approximately 60% of the time, GOP candidates won their race. This was during the election cycle where President Barack Obama, a Democrat, won Wisconsin with almost 53% of the vote.

The current process of partisan gerrymandering, especially in Wisconsin, is very problematic and very undemocratic.

Hong Min Park, Political Science professor

The discrepancy between the number of votes the Republican Party received and the number of seats it won, shown by Park and the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism’s analysis, reveal that the vote share of the maps does not line up with the way a large percentage of Wisconsinites are voting.

Gerrymandering also limits the competitiveness of a district, securing the position for the incumbent and discouraging new candidates from running, Park said. He is concerned about the lack of competition will make politicians less likely to listen to their constituents, regardless of party.

“It’s not entirely fair for the people because this whole redistricting could not represent the interest of the general Wisconsin people,” Park said. “It cannot represent people’s interest correctly.”

Following the passage of the maps, private citizens and advocacy groups filed a lawsuit.

Milwaukee groups advocate for fair maps

Another group concerned about how the new district maps will be drawn is Voces de la Frontera, an immigrant rights advocate.

“Anti-democratic” legislation introduced by Republicans, like the recent voter ID laws and removing inactive voters from the rolls, have worsened the problem created by the 2011 maps, said Voces de la Frontera Political Director Fabi Maldonado.

“Our issues that we care about are not being represented at a local or state level,” Maldonado said. “Because we have limited representation or no representation.  It’s been challenging—disenfranchising voters, keeping us away from the political process has been really challenging for the last ten years. Because of how the maps are drawn, our community can’t win or is not represented. It keeps our issues at bay.”

In 2011, Voces filed a lawsuit against the new district maps, arguing Wisconsin Assembly 8 and 9 in Milwaukee split up the interests of the Latinx community. A federal court ruled in Voces’ favor, and the districts were redrawn.

“This is a vindication, that we were right,” said Executive Director Christine Neumann-Ortiz in a press release following the court’s ruling. “If the Republican Party had chosen to honor the public process—instead of operating secretly—there would have been the opportunity for a meaningful discussion and debate. Instead, it only serves as a lengthy and costly lesson.”

Voces de la Frontera joined Black Leaders Organizing for Communities and the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin to file a lawsuit requesting that the maps be decided by a federal, not a state, court in August 2021. No maps had been proposed at this point.

While the state Constitution states that the Legislature and governor decide maps, most have been decided by the courts since the 1970s because Wisconsin is a purple state. Federal courts have a history of siding with liberal plaintiffs while the Wisconsin Supreme Court is more conservative.

A call for action

Following the finalization of the 2011gerrymandered maps, the call for stronger regulations for the redistricting process gained traction. Groups like the Fair Elections Project, a nonpartisan advocacy group, were formed.

“When elections don’t really matter because the district lines determine which party will be in control, the people don’t have a voice,” the group stated on its website. “This is contrary both to our historical tradition of fairness and the Constitutional requirement that all voters are equal citizens.”

The call to action—the need for equitable maps and fair elections—is agreed upon in the movement. However, the answer to the question “what is a fair map” is not as simple as it might seem. On this, there is no broad consensus.

Different definitions of fair

The 2021 Fair Maps Bills (Senate Bill 389 and Assembly Bill 395) introduced by Sen. Jeff Smith and Rep. Deb Andraca propose that district maps be drawn based on the Iowa model. This redistricting model gives the mapmaking responsibilities to a nonpartisan third-party, requires district lines to coincide with county lines and bans the use of historical voting data, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Wisconsin is one of 34 states where the legislature draws the district maps. Other states use a nonpartisan committee or a collaboration between state representatives and a nonpartisan group to draw their maps.

Groups like Fair Elections Project have supported Smith’s and Andraca’s bills.

The Legislature, led by Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg) and Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), opened the map-making process up for discussion by creating a website that published their proposed maps. The public can access the maps, submit their own and provide feedback.

“The people of Wisconsin want transparency, they want checks and balances, and they want cooperation in how their districts are drawn,” Vos said in a written statement. “The Legislature took into account plans submitted from citizens all over the state and considered submissions from the governor’s People’s Maps Commission, so we are confident these maps are fair for all Wisconsinites.”

Vos did not respond to multiple requests for comment on how the new maps would fairly represent the interests of all Wisconsinites.

Citizen mapmakers

In 2020, Gov. Tony Evers created the People’s Map Commission, a nonpartisan committee, to draw maps to serve as an alternative to those drafted by the Republican-controlled Legislature. The Commission has nine voting members, who cannot hold political office, representing Wisconsin’s eight congressional districts and communities of interest. Legal and redistricting experts would also participate to help the commissioners.

PMC released three sets of suggested maps, designed with public input and Census data, on Nov. 5. The governor has no constitutional authority to create maps, so the PMC’s work can only serve as suggestions for the Legislature.

PMC’s map-drawing criteria prioritizes contiguity, compactness and groups of interest above equal population and partisan fairness, according to a memo. Advocacy groups like Fair Maps Project support Evers’s approach.

“We hope that nonpartisan committees like the People’s Map Commission can correct the undemocratic maps made in 2011,” said Jacob Malinowski, the Fair Maps Project communications director.

However, Matt Petering believes the way both the Legislature and the PMC are drawing maps is flawed. Petering is an associate professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at UW-Milwaukee and specializes in supply-chain management, and he thought there had to be a purely quantitative way to create unbiased maps.

So, he created his own mapmaking algorithm in his free time.

“It is possible to rig a map in such a way that kind of one party is almost guaranteed to help a majority in the Legislature for the whole next decade, no matter how good or bad their ideas or candidates are,” Petering said. “Democracy could be relatively dysfunctional for the next 10 years, if we don’t have a grasp on these issues related to political redistricting.”

“The best outcome for this situation is that you have a toss-up map, a fifty-fifty map, when it comes to looking at equitable populations across the state,” Myers said, “not drawing them with an advantage for either party.”

The algorithm, developed with District Solutions LLC, uses state election data from 2016 to 2020. Unlike the Iowa model or the PMC, Petering’s top priority is partisan fairness, and he does not try to have district lines match up with existing boundaries.

State Rep. LaKeshia Myers (D-Milwaukee) wishes more people like Petering were in the room when both the Legislature and PMC were creating their maps. She hopes he will submit maps generated by his algorithm as an amicus brief, a nonpartisan suggestion, when the maps go to court.

The initial maps proposed by People’s Map Commission the number of African American majority assembly districts from six to four, which violated the Voting Rights Act. African Americans make up about 6% of Wisconsin’s population, which translates to six majority districts.

“People of color often get the short end of the stick, and we don’t want to lose representation,” Myers said. “That’s I fear the most with the People’s maps: they effectively dilute African American votes that impact the African American community’s ability to elect their own person.

The maps prioritized partisan fairness at the expense of racial equity, according to Myers. While the 2011 maps disadvantaged racial minorities, the original PMC maps would have been more harmful for equal representation for people of color, she said.

“I understand what the commission was trying to accomplish by making sure that there was a fifty-fifty opportunity for districts to be either Republican or Democratic,” Myers said, “but I think that, in going about this the way they did, detailed nuances about the Voting Rights Act and the Baldus ruling were missed.”

How representation shapes Milwaukee

Milwaukee’s Neighborhood Strategic Planning Area 4 reaches from the intersection of 8^th Avenue and Locust Street into Glendale, one of the city’s northern suburbs. Raymond Monk advocates for the approximately 9,400 residents of Area 4, who come from diverse social, political and economic backgrounds.

He believes this leads to competing interests, which makes representing the group challenging. When communities are cracked into different districts, they become the minority with less power.

Monk remembers meeting with a public official who said that he spent more time campaigning in communities with higher voter turnout. This meant more attention given to the interests of people more likely to get to the polls.

Where politicians’ attention goes, investment tends to follow, according to Monk.

His prime example was the Amazon Fulfillment Center that opened in Oak Creek, a Milwaukee suburb, in Oct. 2020. The company originally considered building a facility in an abandoned industrial park in the inner city before they got a better financial incentives from Oak Creek, Monk said.

“They used state funds to Oak Creek instead of in the heart of Milwaukee where a large percentage of unemployed people at the time reside,” he said. “Why was that? Because people who live in Oak Creek care about jobs. If politicians don’t see movement or hear about things happening in their neighborhood, there is very little incentive in causing economic redevelopment of an areas where they’re responsible.”

Like Monk, Milwaukee Ald. Ashanti Hamilton (District 1) believes the current maps put urban areas at a disadvantage.

 “We’ve seen many times when [Milwaukee’s state funding] has been funneled to other communities, when they have been intended for the more poverty-stricken areas of the of the state,” Hamilton said.  “So, we’ve lost in that respect. We haven’t had enough voices or votes at the state level to increase our state shared revenue.”

Gov. Scott Walker’s 2011-2013 executive budget cut $14 million from Milwaukee’s state funding.

All of Wisconsin’s urban centers—Madison, Kenosha, Racine, Milwaukee and Green Bay—are hurt by the maps that favor Republicans, Hamilton said. The largest economic and racial disparities can be found in the urban centers.

Approximately 25% of Milwaukee residents live in poverty, according to 2020 Census data. This is more than twice the poverty rate of the state of Wisconsin as a whole.

Hamilton is the chair of Milwaukee’s redistricting committee and oversees the drawing of ward and district maps. He hopes the new maps can fix the disparities by allowing more minority voices to be heard because, he said, “urban centers in the state are clearly losing, when it comes to fair representation at the state level.”

“You will find the greatest disparities and, and urban areas seems to be, you know, a hostility that the state has taken toward urban areas in general,” Hamilton said. “But Milwaukee in particular, and some people think that hostility is centered around race. And others think that it is purely political.”

By hostilities, Hamilton refers to a lack of gun control bills that could reduce gun violence in Milwaukee, reduced public school funding and the city’s share of state shared revenue. He said Milwaukee has been underfunded for the past 25 years, losing out on millions of state dollars.

Creating change

Community organizers and politicians agree that the greatest hurdles to drawing representative, fair maps are awareness and engagement.  

“I think that if more people were paying attention, it would keep [elected officials] more honest,” said Hamilton.

Many of the people the Northwest Side Community Development Corporation organizers work with do not understand what redistricting is or how it works. Monk said it was because no one had taught them about it.

The NWSCDC organizers are trying to break through the day-to-day pressures people face in their lives—what Smith calls “the tyranny of the urgent.”

“It’s the kind of persistence that pays off incrementally,” Smith said. “You can make change, and I believe in the potential of Milwaukee.”