Ken Paxton
AUSTIN – Attorney General Ken Paxton led a 16-state coalition filing a friend-of-the-court brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday in support of Wisconsin’s redistricting maps that were drawn in full compliance with traditional redistricting principles. The outcome of the case could affect elections across the country.
Last year, a panel of three judges in Gill v. Whitford ruled 2-1 that Wisconsin’s 2011 redistricting plan was unconstitutional. That decision was the first from a federal court in more than 30 years to reject a voting map as partisan gerrymandering.
“Never has the U.S. Supreme Court disallowed a legislative map because of partisan gerrymandering, and it surely can’t find fault with Wisconsin’s, which is lawful, constitutional and follows traditional redistricting principles,” Attorney General Paxton said.
In ruling for the plaintiffs in the Wisconsin case, the three-judge panel accepted a fundamentally flawed mathematical formula known as the “efficiency gap” that attempts to measure the level of proportional representation in legislative maps. In his amicus brief, Attorney General Paxton wrote that the formula “does not actually measure vote dilution or distribution in reality, but simply the deviation from a statewide proportional votes-to-seats ratio masked by an additional mathematical formula.”
Texas is joined in the Supreme Court amicus brief by the attorneys general from Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah and West Virginia.
View the amicus brief here: http://bit.ly/2vJTtkx