Wisconsin Fair Maps Coalition by Tony Webster CC BY 2.0 A yard sign in Mellen, Wisconsin reads: "This Time Wisconsin Deserves Fair Maps," paid for by the Fair Elections Project, FairMapsWI.com. The political sign supports redistricting legislation to reform gerrymandering.

A lawsuit filed Thursday seeks to have the Wisconsin Supreme Court declare the state’s current congressional maps unconstitutional because they pack a “substantial share” of the state’s Democratic voters into only two of eight districts. 

The lawsuit, filed against the Wisconsin Elections Commission by the Democratic law firm Elias Law Group on behalf of nine Wisconsin voters, seeks to have the case bypass the lower courts and be taken up directly by the state Supreme Court. The filing comes one month after the state elected Susan Crawford to the Court, maintaining a 4-3 liberal majority on the body until at least 2028. 

“Wisconsin’s congressional map is antithetical to virtually every principle necessary to sustain a representative democracy,” the lawsuit states. “It impermissibly disadvantages voters based on their political views and partisan affiliation, systematically disfavoring Democrats because they are Democrats. By packing the substantial share of Wisconsin’s Democrats into just two congressional districts, while cracking other Democratic communities into uncompetitive Republican districts, the map condemns the party that regularly splits or wins the statewide vote to permanent minority status in the state’s congressional delegation.” 

The lawsuit argues that the nine voters are deprived of their rights because they are Democratic voters who have been drawn into districts that prevent them from electing their chosen candidates. 

In 2021, Gov. Tony Evers and Republicans in control of the Legislature reached a stalemate in negotiations over new congressional and legislative maps, which required the Court to step in. The Court, then controlled by a 4-3 conservative majority, ruled that it would only consider proposed new maps under a “least change” standard — meaning maps had to adhere as closely as possible to the maps that Republicans instituted in 2011. Those 2011 maps were considered among the most extreme partisan gerrymanders in the country. 

In 2022, the Court ultimately chose congressional maps proposed by Evers, but the lawsuit argues that the Court rejected the “least change” approach when it declared the legislative maps unconstitutional in 2023 and should therefore do the same for the congressional maps. 

Last year the Court rejected a similar effort. 

“This Court has since determined that the novel ‘least change’ approach that directly led to this result lacked any basis in this Court’s precedents, the Wisconsin Constitution, or past Wisconsin redistricting practice,” the lawsuit states. “Yet the congressional map adopted under the “least change” approach is now in effect and will remain in effect for the remainder of the decade absent this Court’s action.”