Since 2014, leftist political map makers have relied on a funky formula to argue the existence of partisan gerrymandering. A new report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) breaks down the inherent flaws in the so-called “efficiency gap.”
“The efficiency gap measure has been used primarily by liberals in a number of states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina to make the gerrymandering argument in current political map lawsuits. They believe it is the be-all and end-all of gerrymandering tests. We have determined it cannot be,” explains Will Flanders, research director at the Milwaukee-based conservative law firm.
Flanders and WILL’s Noah Diekemper are authors of “Behind the Lines: Investigating the Efficiency Gap in Redistricting Cases,” exclusively provided to The Federalist. The report lays out several problems undercutting the unquestioned faith the left and the accomplice media have placed in the formula.
‘A Single Tidy Number’
The efficiency gap is the brainchild of legal scholar Nicholas Stephanopoulos and political scientist Eric McGhee. In 2014, the academics published a paper that introduced “a new measure of partisan symmetry.” The efficiency gap formula, as defined by its creators, is the “difference between the parties’ respective wasted votes in an election, divided by the total number of votes cast.”
“It captures, in a single tidy number, all of the packing and cracking decisions that go into a district plan,” the authors boasted.
University of Michigan political scientist Jowei Chen, considered an unimpeachable election maps expert in left-wing circles, has lent the
