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 Illinois needs to end partisan gerrymandering. Gov. J.B.
Pritzker agrees, repeatedly backing redistricting reform in Illinois. He said as
governor he would “support ending the gerrymandering of districts to encourage
more competitive elections.” He even said he would veto any gerrymandered
electoral map.
The next federal and state maps will be drawn on Pritzker’s watch in 2021, using
information from the 2020 Census. Pritzker is right to question the current
map-drawing process. Gerrymandering is a perennial problem that allows
politicians to avoid accountability by making sure they don’t have to compete
for votes. But for some states, including Illinois, the problem is pronounced.
Illinois needs to bring back political competition to the many legislative
districts that lack it by overhauling its mapmaking process. The state should
divorce the redistricting process from the politicians who stand to benefit from
gerrymandering. How? By amending the Illinois Constitution to place
redistricting in the hands of an independent redistricting commission and
relying in part on mathematically generated maps.
The undemocratic results of Illinois’ mapmaking process
In the 2018 election, nearly half of the Illinois House of Representatives seats
were uncontested. In the Illinois Senate, 20 of 39 senators up for election
faced no opponent. There is little incentive to vote when there is no choice on
the ballot. When map-drawing powers change hands, fortunes can dramatically
swing.
In 2011, Democrats drew lines to force incumbent Republicans into the same
district to either face primaries against each other or abandon re-election.
Republicans don’t have much room to complain – they did the same thing in 1991
when they drew the maps. Two incumbent Democratic state senators, Ted Leverenz
of Maywood and Richard Kelly Jr. of Oak Forest, were redistricted into heavily
Republican areas after each had served for over a decade. Both ultimately lost
their seats. While lawmakers on the wrong side of gerrymandering might be map
casualties, it is Illinois’ voters who ultimately lose the map war.
Illinois’ mapmaking process
How did Illinois elections become so uncompetitive? How did so many seats become
safe for incumbents? The state’s mapmaking process is largely to blame.
Who draws the map?
The Illinois Constitution establishes the redistricting process for state
legislative seats in Illinois. For Congressional districts, the state
redistricts through statute passed by the General Assembly and signed by the
governor. Under these provisions, redistricting takes place every decade in the
year following the U.S. Census. The next map for both state legislative and
Congressional districts will be drawn in 2021, after the 2020 Census.
For state legislative districts, if the General Assembly cannot pass a
redistricting bill, there is an eight-member backup redistricting commission.
If the proposed map is unable to gain approval of five commission members, the
Illinois Secretary of State randomly draws a tie-breaker from a pool of two
people from different parties. In practice that is either a Democrat or a
Republican.
If the process goes this far, the result is a winner-take-all map. That is
exactly what happened in three of the past four redistricting cycles. Both
parties have drawn maps to their advantage.
Criteria used to guide mapmaking
There are some very basic requirements mapmakers must currently follow in
Illinois:
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Allow racial or language minority communities to influence
the election of their preferred candidates where possible, even if that
district would not be required by the federal Voting Rights Act
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Be compact
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Be contiguous
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Be substantially equal in population
Otherwise, the mapmakers are free to draw maps to their maximum
political advantage, resulting in the tortured twists and turns in Illinois
districts today.
But that is not how it has to be. Other states have taken steps
toward redistricting reform: Illinois can learn from them.
The path forward
Who draws the maps?
Pritzker explicitly cited competitiveness as a requirement of a fair electoral
map; that is a good place to start when considering redistricting reform. Voters
want the ballots they cast to mean something, and a vote in a “safe” district is
symbolic at best.
Lawmakers tend to like safe districts. Illinois and 36 other states give state
lawmakers the power to redraw their own state legislative districts.
But states are trending toward taking mapmaking out of the hands of lawmakers.
Fourteen states give redistricting commissions the primary responsibility for
drawing state district lines. A Brennan Center for Justice survey of
stakeholders in these states showed more satisfaction with the process than in
other states. Reforms have worked to make elections more competitive. For
example, Arizona now has some of the most competitive districts in the country
after it implemented its independent redistricting commission. Despite partisan
efforts to manipulate the process, California showed a spike in electoral
competition after implementing an independent commission redistricting process.
The margin of victory for lawmakers in Arizona had been consistently lower than
the national average, but the gap with other states widened farther after
Arizona adopted an independent redistricting commission. California’s share of
tossup elections – elections with a victory margin of less than 5 percent –
skyrocketed after implementing their independent redistricting commission.
Seven states have “politician” commissions – commissions in which elected
officials can serve as members – draw the state legislative lines.
Six states limit participation by elected officials. Arizona and California also
bar legislative staff from serving on the commission. California, Idaho and
Washington bar lobbyists from serving on the commission as well.
Criteria to guide mapmaking
While Illinois only requires that districts be compact, contiguous and
substantially equal in population, other states have adopted additional
requirements reflecting their priorities. According to the National Conference
of State Legislatures, some examples of other districting principles or criteria
are:
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Preservation of communities of similar political interest
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Prohibition on favoring or disfavoring an incumbent
candidate or party
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Competitiveness – avoiding “safe” districts
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Proportionality – ensuring the number of seats of each
major political party corresponds closely to the statewide preferences of
the voters
There are plenty of models to choose from, but which of these
practices should Illinois adopt? What principles should mapmakers prioritize
when drawing district lines?
The Brennan Center for Justice drafted a comprehensive report that analyzes
state redistricting processes. The center endorses an independent selection
process, such as a commission that screens for conflicts of interest. The
organization further recommends these commission members be vetted as qualified
to draw legislative maps, and commissions consist of nine to 15 members to
ensure diversity generally reflecting a state’s demographics.
The report singled out Illinois’ tiebreaking model for discouraging compromise
in favor of a winner-take-all attitude. Illinois should drop that practice.
The Brennan report advocates a mapping process that requires approval from each
major political block to gain passage. The problem is that recommendation will
almost certainly lead to gridlock, and there is little elaboration as to how
such a plan would work.
One option is to have the evenly-divided partisan commissioners
choose the final, odd member. However, there is also the issue of the bipartisan
gerrymander, where the two parties collaborate to maintain or increase safe
seats for their parties.
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Another option is a multipartisan commission
consisting of members of both major political parties as well as
independent members or members of a third party. Or the commission
could be a hybrid commission that includes partisan and nonpartisan
elements. For example, in Iowa the nonpartisan Legislative Services
Agency works with a bipartisan commission to draw legislative maps.
Banning elected officials, their staff and lobbyists from serving on
a redistricting commission, and barring commissioners from running
for elected office for a period of time after serving on the
commission, can reduce conflicts of interest inherent when
politicians take part. Some states even randomly draw commissioners
from a pool of lay citizens.
California allows the public to submit their own redistricting plans
for consideration. There is some evidence that publicly drawn maps
tend to be better than legislatively drawn maps.
Organizations such as the Public Map Project even support a
crowd-sourced map drawing process. Submitted maps meeting
constitutional and statutory requirements could be placed in a pool
and picked randomly, or as part of a competition to select the
“best” maps based on criteria. Representatives of the two major
parties could each be given vetoes to eliminate the maps that most
favor either side. Then the commission could choose from the
remaining maps.
In research on effective mapmaking, one consistent emphasis is the
need for enough time and sufficient hearings to ingest the concerns
of citizens and communities affected by redistricting.
An independent commission using ideas from a wide range of
stakeholders can avoid the conflict of interest inherent in
legislative mapmaking by elected officials. It can be responsive to
the needs of Illinois citizens.
Other options remove map drawing from human hands. Professor Richard
Holden of the University of New South Wales proposed a redistricting
process for Illinois that is almost entirely automated. A computer
algorithm programmed within legal restraints could generate
thousands of qualifying maps and select them at random. If some
human element is still desired, an independent commission could
choose from a list of randomly generated maps. Illinois’ intentional
gerrymandering would be nearly impossible.
Potential pitfalls
Independent map commissions are not without risks, but the design
process can mitigate or nearly eliminate those flaws.
For example, if a commission is made up of laypeople by design, a
concern is that the commission will lack political sophistication.
Providing neutral expert assistance would help that issue.
Another risk is that overly restrictive mapmaking criteria make
gerrymandering worse. To curb political gerrymandering, some states
have banned commissions from considering or even accessing political
data or the addresses of incumbents. This can lead to unintended
consequences. Refusing to take political criteria into account will
not save maps from political bias, and could aggravate it.
A 2011 ProPublica report details how California Democrats
manipulated their state’s independent redistricting commission into
drawing the map they wanted. Democrats conspired to create several
seemingly nonpartisan advocacy groups to sway the commission into
drawing maps that would coincidentally protect several Democratic
incumbents. For example, the group OneJoaquin wanted to keep all of
San Joaquin County in a single district, which not-so-coincidentally
would necessitate the creation of a Democratic-leaning district. In
that case, the lack of access to political data almost certainly
prevented the commission from seeing the political ramifications of
the decisions they were making.
Instead of prohibiting the use of political data, an Illinois
redistricting commission should make use of that data to require
competitiveness or proportionality to prevent any unfair partisan
advantage.
In undertaking any of the above reforms, Illinois should be careful
to safeguard against the kind of partisan manipulation seen in
California. Combining the above suggestions could at least mitigate
the conflicts of interests inherent in legislators drawing their own
districts. It could also create less-gerrymandered, more-competitive
districts and remove the winner-take-all stakes Illinois has seen in
recent decades.
The path forward
To accomplish true redistricting reform, Illinois will need a
constitutional amendment. In January, state Sen. Julie Morrison,
D-Deerfield, introduced Senate Joint Resolution Constitutional
Amendment 4. Morrison’s proposal gets a lot right.
The amendment would place state legislative redistricting in the
hands of an independent redistricting commission. The commission
would consist of 16 members. Of those 16, there would be seven
Democrats, seven Republicans and two members of neither party. There
must be at least two commissioners from each judicial district. The
amendment bars elected officials and their family members, lobbyists
and state employees from serving on the commission. Commissioners
cannot serve in the General Assembly for 10 years after their
appointment. Districts drawn by the commission must respect the
boundaries of local governments and communities sharing social or
economic interests to the extent practical, and must not favor or
discriminate against any political party.
This amendment is a huge step in the right direction. But to further
reduce partisan gerrymandering, the Illinois Constitution should
explicitly require districts to be competitive, just as Arizona, New
York and Washington do. This will minimize the number of safe
districts and make sure every Illinoisan’s vote counts. Introducing
randomness into the mapping process would further reduce partisan
gerrymandering.
The amendment currently has 35 co-sponsors, but requires a
three-fifths majority of both the House and the Senate to
voluntarily give up their power over the redistricting process. If
Pritzker publicly supported the amendment and encouraged other
Democratic lawmakers to do the same, Morrison’s amendment could be
placed on the ballot as soon as 2020.
However, this appears unlikely.
Public support for redistricting reform is more widespread. In all
likelihood, a redistricting constitutional amendment will have to be
submitted by the people in order to pass. That is exactly what the
Fair Maps movement attempted in 2016. Their petition for the
Independent Redistricting Map Amendment to hand the redistricting
process to an independent commission received over 550,000
signatures from Illinois voters. According to polling by the Paul
Simon Public Policy Institute, 67 percent of Illinoisans favored the
idea, compared to only 22 percent who were against it.
Despite that popular support, the Illinois Supreme Court’s 4-3
decision struck the Independent Map Amendment from the ballot in
2016. The court did leave a window open for redistricting reform
through citizen initiative, if a narrow one. Nonetheless, the
governor should join voters and strongly support reform efforts. In
the short term, Pritzker’s promise to veto a map has the potential
to prevent a winner-take-all map. But a veto is only a short-term
solution. Only structural reform can ensure that voters choose their
candidates, instead of the candidates choosing their voters.
Academic scholarship and experiences of other states point to taking
the power out of the hands of politicians and putting it in a
nonpartisan redistricting commission made up of Democrats,
Republicans and independents so as to keep politicians from carving
out uncompetitive districts. These commissioners should not be
lobbyists, elected officials or their staff. Commissioners should be
barred from running for office for a period of time after serving on
the commission. California and Arizona have seen more competitive
elections and fewer safe seats after implementing such commissions,
even despite partisan attempts to sabotage the process. Illinois
should take note.
In the long term, Illinois should investigate the possibility of
automating the process, allowing maps to be drawn randomly by
algorithm, and then to be selected by an independent commission.
Using this model to limit conflicts of interest and establish
criteria specifically designed to encourage competition will produce
fairer maps that better represent the people of the Prairie State.
Pritzker’s support for redistricting reform brings hope for
much-needed change in the state, as does his promise to veto any
gerrymandered map. More than that, though, Pritzker should support
commonsense redistricting reforms that reintroduce competition and
fairness to Illinois elections.
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