"The plaintiffs argue that their legal injury is not limited to the injury that they have suffered as individual voters, but extends also to the statewide harm to their interest 'in their collective representation in the legislature'..."

"... and in influencing the legislature’s overall 'composition and policymaking.'... But our cases to date have not found that this presents an individual and personal injury of the kind required for Article III stand­ing. On the facts of this case, the plaintiffs may not rely on 'the kind of undifferentiated, generalized grievance about the conduct of government that we have refused to countenance in the past.'... A citizen’s interest in the overall composition of the legisla­ture is embodied in his right to vote for his representative. And the citizen’s abstract interest in policies adopted by the legislature on the facts here is a nonjusticiable 'gen­eral interest common to all members of the public.'... [Professor] Whitford’s testimony does not support any claim of packing or cracking of him­self as a voter [in his district in Madison, Wisconsin].... His testimony points merely to his hope of achiev­ing a Democratic majority in the legislature—what the plaintiffs describe here as their shared interest in the composition of 'the legislature as a whole.'  Under our cases to date, that is a collective political interest, not an individual legal interest...."

From the Supreme Court's opinion today in Gill v. Whitford, finding no standing to challenge the alleged partisan gerrymandering here in Wisconsin.

You may remember that there was much talk of something called the "efficiency gap," a new way to calculate and give definition to the asserted constitutional wrong. (I blogged about it here, here, and here. ) The Court said:

In the District Court, the plaintiffs’ case rested largely on a particular measure of partisan asymmetry—the “efficiency gap” of wasted votes. See supra, at 3–4. That measure was first developed in two academic articles published shortly before the initiation of this lawsuit. See Stephanopoulos & McGhee, Partisan Gerrymandering and the Efficiency Gap, 82 U. Chi. L. Rev. 831 (2015); McGhee, Measuring Partisan Bias in Single-Member District Electoral Systems, 39 Leg. Studies Q. 55 (2014).

The plaintiffs asserted in their complaint that the “effi­ciency gap captures in a single number all of a district plan’s cracking and packing.” 1 App. 28–29, Complaint ¶5 (emphasis deleted). That number is calculated by sub­tracting the statewide sum of one party’s wasted votes from the statewide sum of the other party’s wasted votes and dividing the result by the statewide sum of all votes cast, where “wasted votes” are defined as all votes cast for a losing candidate and all votes cast for a winning candi­ date beyond the 50% plus one that ensures victory. See Brief for Eric McGhee as Amicus Curiae 6, and n. 3. The larger the number produced by that calculation, the greater the asymmetry between the parties in their efficiency in converting votes into legislative seats. Though they take no firm position on the matter, the plaintiffs have suggested that an efficiency gap in the range of 7% to 10% should trigger constitutional scrutiny. See Brief for Appellees 52–53, and n. 17.

The plaintiffs and their amici curiae promise us that the efficiency gap and similar measures of partisan asym­metry will allow the federal courts—armed with just “a pencil and paper or a hand calculator”—to finally solve the problem of partisan gerrymandering that has confounded the Court for decades. Brief for Heather K. Gerken et al. as Amici Curiae 27 (citing Wang, Let Math Save Our Democracy, N. Y. Times, Dec. 5, 2015). We need not doubt the plaintiffs’ math. The difficulty for standing purposes is that these calculations are an average measure. They do not address the effect that a gerrymander has on the votes of particular citizens. Partisan-asymmetry metrics such as the efficiency gap measure something else entirely: the effect that a gerrymander has on the fortunes of political parties.

Consider the situation of Professor Whitford, who lives in District 76, where, defendants contend, Democrats are “naturally” packed due to their geographic concentration, with that of plaintiff Mary Lynne Donohue, who lives in Assembly District 26 in Sheboygan, where Democrats like her have allegedly been deliberately cracked. By all ac­counts, Act 43 has not affected Whitford’s individual vote for his Assembly representative—even plaintiffs’ own demonstration map resulted in a virtually identical dis­trict for him. Donohue, on the other hand, alleges that Act 43 burdened her individual vote. Yet neither the efficiency gap nor the other measures of partisan asymmetry offered by the plaintiffs are capable of telling the differ­ence between what Act 43 did to Whitford and what it did to Donohue. The single statewide measure of partisan advantage delivered by the efficiency gap treats Whitford and Donohue as indistinguishable, even though their individual situations are quite different.

That shortcoming confirms the fundamental problem with the plaintiffs’ case as presented on this record. It is a case about group political interests, not individual legal rights. But this Court is not responsible for vindicating generalized partisan preferences. The Court’s constitu­tionally prescribed role is to vindicate the individual rights of the people appearing before it.

The case is remanded to the District Court to give the plaintiffs a chance to use traditional standing doctrine — a concrete and particularized injury to themselves as voters as opposed to the innovative approach the Court rejected as a mere "generalized grievance" that does not form a basis for the exercise of judicial power.

ALSO: Here's something I wrote about the "efficiency gap" theory back when the district court decided the case (in November 2016):

[Haven't] Democrats...  gerrymandered themselves by living in Madison and Milwaukee? I can believe we are the most sharply geographically partisan state in the union. It didn't take power-grabbing legislators drawing new and devious lines to make that so. It can be partly or mostly the behavior of people choosing where to live and being like-minded with our neighbors.

In the 2012 elections, Republicans got 48.6% of the vote, but won  61% of the seats in the Wisconsin assembly. I said:

That's like the way Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the presidential election: Democrats crowd together in smaller parts of the overall territory. The math doesn't prove the lines were drawn aggressively to take partisan advantage. The state lines never move, and we see, in the national election, the effects of the people who are Democrats gerrymandering themselves. I'm skeptical of this "clear mathematical formula" as a measurement of what happened in the minds of the line-drawers.

And again in January, 2017, I wrote:

This [efficiency gap] test helps Democrats overcome the problem of having its voters concentrated in relatively small geographic spaces — that is, cities. It would make an equal protection problem out of a pattern of human behavior. It's basically the same problem Democrats have with the Electoral College: Their voters aren't spread out enough geographically. This is a terrible problem for Democrats, but I can't believe the Supreme Court will inscribe their mathematical fix into constitutional law.