Illinois lawmakers punt remap amendment after SCOTUS Voting Rights Act
ruling
[April 30, 2026]
By Ben Szalinski and Peter Hancock
SPRINGFIELD — Illinois lawmakers are not planning to pursue a
constitutional amendment on redistricting after a key U.S. Supreme Court
ruling on Wednesday.
Senate President Don Harmon, D-Oak Park, told Capitol News Illinois that
Senate Democrats decided not to call an amendment that passed House last
week after the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a hefty blow the federal Voting
Rights Act. If approved by voters, it would have rewritten the state’s
redistricting rules.
“We want to spend a little bit of time unpacking the Supreme Court
decision to make sure we get it right and protect the voting rights of
Illinois residents,” Harmon said. “It’s much better and much more
important to get this correct than to do it quickly. The worst thing
that would happen is if we rushed and there were unintended consequences
that undermine people’s voting rights.”
But that means the matter will have to wait until at least 2028, as
lawmakers faced a May 3 deadline to approve constitutional amendments
for voters to consider in November.
The proposed amendment would have inserted a provision from the Voting
Rights Act into the state constitution to specifically direct lawmakers
to consider race in drawing district lines.
The Voting Rights Act provision has long been interpreted as a ban on
splitting large minority groups into multiple legislative districts to
dilute their voting power.
The U.S. Supreme Court, however, struck down Louisiana’s congressional
map on Wednesday, ruling a district drawn to consolidate Black voters
was illegally gerrymandered based on race. While the decision did not
broadly eliminate the section of the Voting Rights Act, dissenting
liberal Justice Elena Kagan suggested it is “all but a dead letter.”
Racial intent
David Becker, founder and executive editor of the nonpartisan Center for
Election Innovation and Research, called the decision a “radical” change
in the way voting rights cases are now reviewed.
“When I woke up this morning, we had a functional Voting Rights Act,” he
said during a media briefing on the case Wednesday. “And unfortunately,
I can’t say that anymore.”
Prior to Wednesday’s decision, he said, plaintiffs in voting rights
cases only had to show that a set of maps had the effect of diluting a
minority group’s voting strength, not that there was a specific intent
to discriminate.
Wednesday’s decision, he said, reverses that standard and provides what
he called “a clear roadmap” for how a state legislature can engage in
racial gerrymandering without it being declared illegal.
“All it has to do is to be very careful about talking about intent,” he
said. “Don’t talk about intent at all. Couch everything in partisanship.
And then it can’t even be really reviewed because racial effects aren’t
going to be enough to establish a violation, even if those racial
effects are stark.”
Illinois reaction
Illinois House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, D-Hillside, said fear that
the court would strike down protections for racial groups inspired him
to pursue the constitutional amendment. While the court did not go that
far, the ruling that lawmakers cannot draw maps based on race affirmed
many Democrats’ fears.
“The decision by the Supreme Court today on the Voting Rights Act is an
abomination,” Gov. JB Pritzker told reporters in Chicago. “It is an
attack on a crown jewel of our democracy.”
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Senate President Don Harmon, D-Oak Park, said state lawmakers need
more time to evaluate a U.S. Supreme Court ruling before proceeding
with a constitutional amendment. (Capitol News Illinois photo by
Jerry Nowicki)
Illinois’ proposed amendment would’ve established a priority list
stating what factors lawmakers should consider in the redistricting
process. It stated they should draw districts “to be substantially equal
in population; to ensure that no citizen is denied an equal opportunity
to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of
his or her choice on account of race; to create, where practical, racial
coalition or influence Districts; to be contiguous; and to the extent
practicable, to be compact.”
Harmon said the ruling “highlights how much the court would frown upon
race being a predominant factor in drawing districts.”
The Illinois Voting Rights Act, which was established in 2011, requires
lawmakers to create “crossover” districts where minority groups are a
large enough share of the population to potentially elect their
preferred candidate and “influence” districts where a racial minority is
large enough to sway the outcome of an election toward their preferred
candidate.
Political fight
House Republicans argued last week that the amendment was in response to
a lawsuit they filed last year that sought to overturn the state’s
legislative maps by alleging dozens of districts failed to meet a
decades-old Illinois Supreme Court precedent that defined an
appropriately compact map. The Illinois Supreme Court ultimately tossed
the lawsuit, ruling it was filed too late.
They said the proposed constitutional amendment would give Democrats
more leeway to draw heavily gerrymandered districts that snake around
communities.
“This Supreme Court decision addresses the very gerrymandering efforts
the Democrats are hoping to codify into Illinois law with this
Constitutional Amendment,” the Illinois Freedom Caucus, a group of
far-right Republicans, said in a statement. “(House Joint Constitutional
Amendment 28) is now, very clearly, unconstitutional.”
New congressional maps are not in General Assembly Democrats’ plans for
now either. The possibility was floated last year as other states began
redrawing their boundaries to increase partisan representation in
Congress, but talks in Illinois faded after Indiana Republicans decided
not to attempt a mid-decade remap.
“I think we have an excellent congressional map that reflects the
communities of interest across the state,” Harmon said. “I’m not sure
that we could, and if we could, whether we should draw a district that
leans more one way or the other.”
Capitol News Illinois is
a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government
coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily
by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
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