Please Vote on April 4 THIS ELECTION WILL DETERMINE THE FUTURE OF WISCONSIN

BY THE SHEPHERD EXPRESS EDITORIAL BOARD

Spring elections are local elections for city, village, town or county offices along with judicial elections, school board elections and any special elections to fill vacancies. These are non-partisan elections meaning that candidates run as individuals and not on a party ticket.

The April 4 election is very important for the future of Wisconsin. The State Supreme Court election will determine the direction of Wisconsin for the next 10 years, including whether women will have full access to reproductive choices including abortions. After the retirement of one of the far-right justices this year, the court will have three conservative and three progressive justices.

With a new progressive justice, the court will also be able to decide whether Wisconsin will continue to have honest and fair legislative districts not the unconstitutionally gerrymandered legislative districts as they were declared by a conservative three-judge federal judicial panel.

Our unconstitutionally extreme gerrymandered districts enable one party to win the vast majority of the legislative races even when they received less than half of the total statewide votes for legislators. This is why Wisconsin, which had a national reputation for being a smart, forward-looking state, has fallen toward the bottom of the lists along with Alabama and Mississippi in such areas as education, fair taxation, equal opportunity to vote and protecting our children and senior citizens. These extreme gerrymandered districts enable the legislators to ignore the wishes of their constituents since it is virtually impossible for them to lose in their gerrymandered districts.