Would you like your vote to count a little extra? Simply live next door to a prison, and your vote could pack as much as twice – or more – the punch of the average elector’s. To prevent this inequity, a national group called the Prison Policy Initiative is pushing legislators in Wisconsin and other states to count the prisoners as residents of their home district. So far, there is no sign Wisconsin’s Republican-led legislature will consider this issue when redistricting.
(illustrations by Adrian Palomo)
A classic case of this inequity was the town of Anamosa, Iowa, site of a maximum-security prison. Ten years ago, a write-in candidate was elected alderman with only his vote and that of three family members; that’s because the district was made up of 1,321 prisoners (who can’t vote) and 58 non-inmates (whose votes were badly split). This ghost district with almost no voters nonetheless held the same electoral clout as any other in the city. (After public outcry, the council switched to at-large representation.)
What is the impact of prisons in Wisconsin, where redistricting is ongoing in the state’s 72 counties? Consider the City of Waupun, where, since the last redistricting, 64 percent of 2nd Aldermanic District residents are inmates of its eponymous correctional facility, Wisconsin’s first prison. This gives every 36 voters in the district the same electoral power as 100 voters elsewhere.
Waupun’s 3rd Aldermanic District is even more populated with prisoners, with 79 percent of residents inmates of the Dodge Correctional Facility and ineligible to vote, thereby giving any 21 voters the same electoral power as 100 voters elsewhere.
The problem, as Milwaukee Magazine pointed out in a March 2008 article entitled “Fuzzy Math,” revolves on the definition of “residence.” According to the US Census, prisoners reside in their place of incarceration. Others argue that a residence is the place one expects to return to someday, and this is the definition used for Armed Forces personnel. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, a Massachusetts-based organization, some two million people were counted using what it considers to be the wrong residence during the most recent census. The group calls this “prison-based gerrymandering.”
000 Census, that included over 8,400 mostly minority Milwaukee residents who are counted in their place of incarceration. Milwaukee County provides 42 percent of all the state’s inmates yet houses a mere handful here. Instead they are incarcerated in facilities generally located in rural areas that have little in common with the urban minority population that artificially inflates the number of electors in these districts.
This year, the Prison Policy Initiative has released over two dozen reports on redistricting in Wisconsin communities that have prison populations suggesting that lawmakers should not count incarcerated people during the redistricting, now under way across the state.
In Waupun, the council appears to favor a plan to be presented in May which will divide the prison populations among its aldermanic districts to minimize the impact of the prison population on voting power.
Waupun City Administrator Kyle Clark told the media, “The City of Waupun Clerk and (I) have been working with our County Clerks in determining County Supervisory Districts. For Dodge County – the County Supervisory Districts will include portions of WCI, DCI and Burke Center inmate population allocations. The City of Waupun will seek to balance our Aldermanic Districts with both inmate and resident numbers that are roughly equal in numbers.”
However, Waupun may run a risk of creating tortuously drawn districts that may run afoul of state law mandating “compactness” of districts.
Closer to home, the PPI’s “Prisoners of the Census” study found that Franklin’s 1st Aldermanic District was “padded” by 1,879 inmates at the House of Correction, giving voters of that district a 38 percent boost over their counterparts in the southern Milwaukee County city.
The group fears that the City of Waukesha would draw a district that is 15 percent prisoners if unadjusted Census data were used for its Huber inmates. There are two Waukesha County Sheriff’s Department correctional facilities: the County Jail and the Huber Facility.
The Prisoners of the Census project recommended in 2008 that the best solution would be for the Census Bureau to simply count prisoners as residents of the communities in which they resided when sentenced. However, the Census did not do that in the 2010 count. Instead, it will release a report this month listing “group quarters population,” which it says can enable redistricting officials nationwide to account for their prison populations.
But the tool is of no use to Wisconsin officials, Larry Barish, research manager of the State of Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau tells NewsBuzz: “The Group Quarters file … only identifies the location of group quarters and not the prior residence of individuals. Thus this data is of no use in identifying the specific block to reallocate group quarters population.”
State Rep. Fred Kessler (D-Milwaukee) has suggested a simpler solution: Wisconsin should follow the lead of states like Mississippi, Colorado and New Jersey and simply not count prisoners (who after all, do not vote) for redistricting purposes. But Kessler told Milwaukee Magazine he doubted such a change will occur so long as Republicans hold control of the legislature.
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