Wisconsin Republicans Pass Act 43 Gerrymandering Plan in Secret Process

Wisconsin Republicans pass 2011 Wisconsin Act 43, implementing extreme partisan gerrymandering through an unprecedented secret process. The redistricting plan, drawn behind closed doors at a private law firm with rank-and-file Republican legislators required to sign confidentiality agreements, creates what federal judges will later describe as the most gerrymandered maps in the United States.

The Secret Process

Republican leaders hire the private law firm Michael Best & Friedrich to draw new legislative and congressional maps following the 2010 Census. The redistricting occurs entirely in secret at the law firm’s offices, away from public view and without Democratic participation. Rank-and-file Republican legislators are required to sign secrecy oaths before being allowed to view their own district boundaries—an extraordinary measure that treats redistricting as classified information rather than public policy.

The secret process includes destruction of thousands of files, confiscation of computers, and evidence of tampering with digital records. Federal courts will later characterize this secrecy as a “shameful” attempt to hide from public scrutiny. Even Republican legislators themselves are kept in the dark about the overall strategy, seeing only their individual districts while being sworn to silence about what they learn.

High-Tech Partisan Engineering

Act 43 employs sophisticated computer algorithms and data analysis to maximize partisan advantage. Using new redistricting software and detailed voter data, Republican mapmakers precisely identify Democratic voters and systematically crack and pack them to minimize Democratic representation. The technology allows for district boundaries to be drawn with surgical precision, creating durable Republican majorities even in this swing state.

The maps are designed explicitly to “make it more difficult for Democrats, compared to Republicans, to translate their votes into seats,” as federal courts will later document. This represents a fundamental departure from traditional redistricting principles, prioritizing partisan advantage over geographic communities, local government boundaries, or voter preferences.

Impact and Durability

Act 43 creates extreme and durable partisan bias in Wisconsin’s legislative maps. Federal judges will find that the maps constitute an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander, with the redistricting designed to entrench Republican control regardless of electoral outcomes. The maps prove highly effective: in subsequent elections, Democrats consistently win statewide races while Republicans maintain commanding legislative majorities.

The redistricting employs sophisticated “efficiency gap” analysis—a measure of wasted votes—to ensure that Democratic votes are packed into districts Democrats win overwhelmingly or spread across districts where Democrats consistently fall just short of victory. This creates a system where Democrats need to win by extraordinarily large margins statewide to overcome the structural bias built into the maps.

Legal and Democratic Implications

The secret process and extreme partisan outcomes make Wisconsin’s Act 43 a focal point for gerrymandering litigation. The case Gill v. Whitford challenges the maps as unconstitutional partisan gerrymandering, reaching the Supreme Court in 2017. Though the Supreme Court ultimately declines to address the partisan gerrymandering question on standing grounds, lower federal courts find the maps unconstitutional.

The use of confidentiality agreements with legislators represents an extraordinary corruption of the legislative process. Elected officials are required to swear secrecy about the creation of the very districts they represent—preventing them from informing constituents or discussing the redistricting publicly. This secrecy demonstrates consciousness that the maps cannot withstand public scrutiny.

Significance

Wisconsin’s Act 43 represents the intersection of technology, secrecy, and partisan manipulation in modern gerrymandering. The secret process—complete with lawyer-drawn maps, confidentiality oaths, destroyed documents, and tampered computers—demonstrates that Republican leaders understood their actions would not survive transparency. The sophistication of the technical analysis shows how modern data and software enable unprecedented precision in manipulating electoral outcomes.

The Wisconsin case becomes a landmark example of how gerrymandering can effectively nullify democracy, creating a system where legislators choose their voters rather than voters choosing their legislators. Federal courts’ characterization of the process as “shameful” and the maps as the “most gerrymandered in the United States” underscores the extremity of Republican tactics.

The secrecy and extremity of Act 43 epitomize the REDMAP strategy’s success: by investing in state legislative races in 2010, Republicans gained the power to manipulate democracy itself through redistricting, creating structural advantages that persist regardless of voter preferences or electoral outcomes.