Evers takes aim at ending gerrymandering, restoring electoral equity
photo from Wisconsin.Gov
Lawmakers across the U.S. have recently felt pressure to redraw congressional maps to favor their political parties prior to mid-term elections. Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers called a special session on April 14, 2026 to propose a constitutional amendment to ban such partisan gerrymandering.
Barry Burden, founding member of the Elections Research Center, Lyons Family Chair in Electoral Politics, and professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, warns that gerrymandering could affect smaller cities like Oshkosh.
“Partisan gerrymandering prioritizes favoring the political party that has the power to draw district lines over other concerns such as keeping communities intact,” he said. “Smaller cities such as Oshkosh are sometimes split between district by lines that cut through them or use strategically as puzzle pieces as parts of larger districts to advantage one party over the other.”
Burden believes that the push to ban partisan gerrymandering will allow for increasingly fair elections and vote distribution in Wisconsin.
“If partisan gerrymandering is banned by voters, control of the state legislature and the state’s eight congressional districts would be more consistently competitive,” he said. “The maps might still show some bias for Republicans due to the concentration of Democratic-leaning voters in urban areas, but overall a ban would make it more likely that both parties have a good shot at winning control of the state legislature.”
Evers aims to change political maps that are unfair to both Republican and Democratic parties during election, as he describes how Oshkosh was mapped prior to his election to governor.
“Back in the day, before last time around and we changed it, there was actually an assembly district in Oshkosh and there was a second assembly district in the middle of that district,” he said. “If you can imagine, it was like a donut surrounding a smaller piece, and it was just ridiculous.”
Michael Jasinski, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, describes how relatively smaller cities like Oshkosh would be impacted by gerrymandering given the geographical size.
“In terms of affecting a small city like Oshkosh, it means that potentially district line would run through our city in a very strange way,” he said. “One side of the street would be in one district, the other side in another district, and it would also complicate the placement of voting precincts.”
Jasinski believes that if one district is heavily gerrymandered, it may give voters a difficult time to figure out and vote, hindering the election by impacting voters.
“If the map is complicated enough, individual voters might have a hard time finding out exactly which district is theirs,” he said.
Evers plans to push his plan of banning partisan gerrymandering as he emphasizes the importance of Wisconsin elections because it is a purple state.
“So we call ourselves purple, not blue, not red, but purple,” he said. “The way it was, the Republicans changed the map so weirdly that they had a large, large, large difference between the Republicans and Democrats in the Assembly and the Senate.”
Since Wisconsin is a purple state, Evers said there aren’t too many changes that need to be made about current Oshkosh district maps other than enforcing fairness in elections.
“In Oshkosh, I’d say three-quarters of a city now is in one assembly district, and its neighborhoods that are kept together, wards that are kept together,” he said. “We’re keeping neighborhoods together and the district is contiguous with both the city and surrounding townships.”
David Siemers, professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh, describes how the ban for partisan gerrymandering would increase competition, which further promotes Wisconsin as a purple state.
“But more likely this Republican-tilted Senate district would simply be offset by a more Democratic-tilted district elsewhere,” he said. “As long as the sum total of districts isn’t tilted toward one party or the other, it would satisfy the ‘no gerrymandering’ stipulation.”
Siemers stands strongly with fair voting deeming it to be one of the building blocks in American government.
“These are essential elements of democracy,” he said. “And democracy is about people being able to make meaningful choices about their government.”
Evers has upcoming plans and hopes that the future of democracy is completely gerrymandering free.
“What I’m hoping to do is to essentially change our constitution to make it very, very clear that gerrymandering is a bad deal and we should we should ban it and that will force both sides eventually to come together and say okay we can’t gerrymander so how do we how do we do it the correct way?” he said. “We have to kind of kill the gerrymander and one of the ways to do it is via our constitutional amendment.”
West junior Farhana Amin agrees strongly with the ban, prioritizing fair voting for all.
“The fact of trying to manipulate border lines just to be able to get more votes; I think it’s kind of stupid,” she said. “I think it is more fair and equally representative in itself if you just let their votes stand for themselves and have lines that make more sense based on communities and cities instead of splitting them apart and constantly changing them.”
Siemers advises that the next generation of voters should be up to date on election changes, as well as gerrymandering in order to make the decision they won’t regret.
“There is a big push to ban partisan gerrymandering because it clearly prevents competitive elections and party changeover of legislatures,” he said. “So as I always tell my students, the details are really important, and how election laws are written helps to determine electoral outcomes.”
by Yui Watanabe
Published April 27, 2026
Oshkosh West Index Volume 122 Issue VII