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Speaker 1: Bloomberg Law with June Grosso and Michael Best on demand

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Speaker 1: via our Bloomberg Radio Plus app free for iPhone and

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Speaker 1: Android devices. Now it's time for our daily Bloomberg Law Brief,

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Speaker 1: exploring legal issues in the news. Today, Bloomberg Law House

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Speaker 1: Gregg's Stuart Michael Best discuss a Wisconsin federal court decision

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Speaker 1: rejecting voter Jerry band erring of voting districts in Wisconsin.

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Speaker 1: They speak with Nathan Percilly, professor at Stanford University Law School,

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Speaker 1: and Ruth Greenwood, Deputy director of redistricting at the Campaign

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Speaker 1: Legal Center. Ruth, before we get into the nitty gritty

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Speaker 1: of what the courts said, this was not one of

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Speaker 1: these cases where you have have districts that that look

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Speaker 1: like an ink blot or a snake or something like that.

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Speaker 1: These are relatively compact districts in Wisconsin. So what from

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Speaker 1: your standpoint was the constitutional problem. You're right that the

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Speaker 1: districts uh weren't what we would traditionally describe as as

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Speaker 1: non compact um uh And and I guess to me,

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Speaker 1: the reason that originally compact, nous or strange looking districts

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Speaker 1: was the real was how part of the jerrymandering was described.

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Speaker 1: It goes back to Elbridge Jerry. He drew a district

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Speaker 1: who was governor of Massachusetts at the time, and the

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Speaker 1: plan had a district that looks like a salamander. It

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Speaker 1: became known as Jerry's salamander or the jerrymander. And from

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Speaker 1: there we were able to see that because he had

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Speaker 1: drawn a strange shape, we could infer that he had

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Speaker 1: some partisan intent or was trying to get some advantage

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Speaker 1: for his side. You know, fast forward to eleven and

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Speaker 1: when the Wisconsin legislature were drawing their plans, UM they

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Speaker 1: had you know, the latest computer technology to help them

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Speaker 1: to be able to still get that part of an advantage,

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Speaker 1: but to bake that into the cake while having fairly

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Speaker 1: compact districts. And so then the question in the case was, well,

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Speaker 1: how can you tell if you can't tell by looking

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Speaker 1: at the shape of the districts that these are advantaging

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Speaker 1: one side, how can you tell? And so we looked

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Speaker 1: to political scientists UM to to look at how much

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Speaker 1: of a an advantage one side might get compared to another.

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Speaker 1: So UM an easy way to think about it is,

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Speaker 1: you know, in more people in Wisconsin voted the Democratic

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Speaker 1: candidates for the state legislature, and yet Republican candidates had

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Speaker 1: about the legislature. So, Nate, what what did the court

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Speaker 1: say was the reason that it found the sun constitutional. Well,

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Speaker 1: the Court said that there was a discriminatory intent, which

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Speaker 1: is to say that Republicans are trying to maximize their

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Speaker 1: chances of getting a large number of seats and holding

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Speaker 1: on to control, and that there was a discriminatory effect

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Speaker 1: that they were able to achieve that over two elections,

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Speaker 1: and that there was no neutral justification for the plan,

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Speaker 1: that you can't justify it as something you know, based

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Speaker 1: on the way the population was distributed or the like.

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Speaker 1: That this was an intentional gerrymander and it achieved its intent.

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Speaker 1: Those n P. Silly, professor at Stanford University Law School,

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Speaker 1: and Ruth Greenwood, Deputy director of redistricting at the Campaign

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Speaker 1: Legal Center, speaking with Bloomberg Law host Gregg's Story and

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Speaker 1: Michael Best. And you can listen to Bloomberg Law weekdays

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