I talked with somebody knowledgeable about this last night.
He said this is destined to go before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Here is the PDF of the legal complaint.
Here is the story on this from Gil Halsted and Scottie Lee Meyers of WPR.
Update: Here’s the M.J.Sentinel story in case you want to see that. Or the over 600 comments on the article (I bet they are all from intelligent, even-keeled sorts).
Hopefully this new federal lawsuit wil go better than the old one!
Care to walk down memory lane with me on this?
First off, the public smelled a rotten egg when Robin Vos refused to allow a public hearing on redistricting despite being badgered by the editorial boards of at least 11 media outlets.
We also learned that Republican lawmakers were told that they needed to sign a secret pact on redistricting maps or else. Later the WI Republicans tried to hide information from a 3-judge panel dealing with a lawsuit that Voces de la Frontera brought up (I believe their lawsuit was specific to Latinos in south districts in Milwaukee).
Wisconsin’s good old boy Republicans said they thought that all the info. related to the redistricting was theirs to keep secret because of “client attorney privilege”.
Are you laughing? Because I am laughing. The judges weren’t laughing. They demanded the info. Then the WI Republicans said it was missing. So Robin Vos got subpoenaed.
Also served with subpoena papers: Jeffrey Renk, Patrick Fuller, Scott Fitzgerald, and Legislative Technology Service Bureau. And James Troupis got called in on a deposition.
(Say. Didn’t Troupis get appointed to a judge seat by Walker recently? Wasn’t Troupis also Justice David Prosser’s go-to guy? I think so.)
And remember how eventually 9 computer drives were turned in and one of those drives was unreadable AND it had a dented scratched up case that made it look like the drive’s metal housing was removed? How very odd.
In the end, Voces dropped the case, coming to an agreement that there was no proof that “bad intent” led to the delition of all the thousands of redistricting files.
No bad intent even though it could be determined that Tad Ottman and Adam Foltz were logged into the computers used to do the redistricting work when thousands of files were deleted. And no bad intent when it was clear that a program that covers tracks on deleted files was also being used on Ottman and Foltz’ computers.
I believe their boss at the time was Joe Handrick and that the young men were working on the records (the PUBLIC’s records) inside of the offices of Michael Best & Friedrich LLP at the time which happens to be off of the State of Wisconsin’s computer network.
You can see that public-private partnerships offer secrecy as well as convenient funneling of public money into private pockets.
blue cheddar 