And no, this post isn’t a rant against gerrymandering or other bias in district distribution. This is more an observation on how ass backwards the system seems to be.
This all comes from a newspaper article in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel stating that the City of Milwaukee had to wait for Milwaukee County to draw their supervisory districts before the city could complete work on their aldermanic districts.
WTF?
Apparently once the Census figures are received by the State of Wisconsin, the legislature, governor, and whatever powers that be dig in and set up their Assembly and Senate districts. And also redistrict for the federal House of Representatives based on how many house seats the state is assigned by the feds. And then as stated above, the local jurisdictions parse out their various supervisory seats, city council seats, board seats, whatever. And this all seems ass backwards to me.
To me step one should be the cities, towns, and villages should set up their local wards and precincts. Then the counties should build off of that. And then the state can come in and form their various state and federal districts accordingly.
Yes there will still be arguments and lawsuits and all kinds of attempts to seek advantage…but shouldn’t we be doing this from the bottom up? Where the voters live? And by the elected bodies closet to the voters?
Recent Comments