A federal court panel in Chicago on Thursday upheld a Democratic redrawing of the state’s 177 legislative district boundaries, paving the way for next year’s statehouse elections and rejecting challenges from Republicans and Latino and Black advocacy groups that argued it violated voting rights laws.
The three-judge panel sided with arguments from majority legislative Democrats, who drew the map and said that Illinois’ history of racial crossover voting meant the state’s growing Latino population could elect their choice of a candidate without the court mandating additional Latino-majority districts.
The judges also rejected arguments from the NAACP of East St. Louis that Democrats unfairly diluted Black voters from a traditionally Black state House district, instead saying the move was done to shore up white Downstate Democratic districts in rural areas where Republican strength is increasing. Political gerrymandering, while controversial, is legal, they said.
“In the end, we find that the boundaries for Illinois House and Senate districts … neither violate the Voting Rights Act nor the Constitution,” the court wrote.
“The record shows ample evidence of crossover voting to defeat any claim of racially polarized voting sufficient to deny Latino and Black voters of the opportunity to elect candidates of their choice in the challenged districts,” the court wrote.
The panel consisted of Chief District Judge Jon E. DeGuilio, an appointee of President Barack Obama; Circuit Judge Michael B. Brennan, a President Donald Trump appointee; and District Judge Robert M. Dow Jr., who was appointed by President George W. Bush.
The ruling paves the way for state legislative candidates to begin circulating petitions starting Jan. 13 to gain the required signatures to earn a spot on the June 28 primary ballot. Lawmakers pushed back the traditional March primary after delays in federal census results needed to conduct the once-every-decade drawing of legislative and congressional districts to reflect population changes.
The redrawing of the 118 House and 59 state Senate district boundaries is the most partisan act of the General Assembly, and the new map is aimed at sustaining, if not increasing, the Democrats’ supermajorities in both chambers.
Since Democrats control the legislature and the governor’s office, no Republican input was required for approving the map. The same situation applied a decade ago, and the resulting map produced the current 41-18 Democratic advantage over Republicans in the state Senate and the 73-44 edge Democrats hold over the GOP in the Illinois House.
Looking at the prospect of Republicans remaining the minority party in the legislature for the next 10 years, Illinois Senate Republican leader Dan McConchie of Hawthorn Woods called the ruling a “disappointment” adding, “that does not mean we will ever stop fighting for independent maps in Illinois.”
McConchie reiterated Republican complaints that reelection-seeking Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed the map, in contrast to an early campaign pledge not to approve a partisan-drawn map. Pritzker later tempered his commitment, saying he would not sign an “unfair” map.
There was no immediate comment from the map’s other challengers on whether they would seek an appeal.
But state Rep. Lisa Hernandez, the Cicero Democrat who chaired the House Redistricting Committee, said the ruling “confirms that our map is constitutional, adheres to the Voting Rights Act and preserves Illinois’ reputation as a model for the nation when it comes to minority representation.”
Democrats and their attorneys defended the new map by saying the political sensibilities of Illinois and its voters far surpassed the racially polarized voting that led to the remedies required under the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Democrats argued that the challenges raised by Republicans, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the NAACP that Latinos were shortchanged of majority-Latino legislative districts and that Blacks were moved out of a heavily Black East St. Louis district represented outmoded thinking. Rather than pack ethnic and racial voters into districts, they should be spread into other districts to create new opportunities for increased representation, they argued.
Democrats noted that in the current General Assembly there are 114 Democrats in both chambers. Of that total, 34 are Black, 16 are Latino, and five are Asian — representing 48% of the Democratic caucus.
Republicans and MALDEF had filed suit contending Democrats ignored census data that showed the Latino population increased by 15% or nearly 310,000 people over the last decade while the state suffered a first-ever decline in population.
The number of districts with majority-Latino voting-age populations fell from five to four in the House, and three to two in the Senate, Republicans and MALDEF said.
Republicans proposed four majority-Latino House districts in northern Cook County and seven in southern Cook County and five Senate districts in the county. The GOP also proposed a district in Aurora with an opportunity for a Latino to win election and a Black-majority district in the East St. Louis region where Black voters had been dispersed among three districts.
The NAACP made a similar argument to the federal court against how the Democratic map splits up Black voting populations.
MALDEF contended the Democratic map engaged in a “racial gerrymander” aimed at protecting white Southwest Side incumbents and proposed three additional majority-Latino citizen voting-age House districts and one state Senate district on the North Side as well as two Latino-majority House districts and one Senate district on the Southwest Side and southwest suburbs.
Democrats contended the proposed Republican Latino districts were an attempt to alter other districts to create GOP-leaning opportunities for representation. They said the MALDEF map also would split Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood into different districts, diluting the ability of Asian Americans to elect a representative.
“Latino representation in the state legislature dips below the state average, but Latino candidates occupy 10 of 118 (8.5%) of Illinois State House seats and six of 59 (10%) of Illinois State Senate seats, which is just shy of Latinos’ approximate 11.2% of citizen voting age population,” the court wrote.
“Latino-preferred candidates have prevailed in 52.9% of elections in the North Side districts in the past decade and 57% of the South Side districts,” the judges wrote.
“That record, together with a substantial amount of white crossover voting indicate an absence of majority bloc voting. With this absence of significant white bloc voting, it cannot be said that the ability of minority voters to elect their chosen representatives is inferior to that of white voters.’”
The court sided with testimony from Democratic witnesses who said racial consideration was one part of drawing the new boundaries but was not the predominant factor and that “Illinois mapmakers were motivated principally by partisan political considerations” to maximize Democratic representation, which is allowable under previous Supreme Court rulings.
“We recognize that partisan gerrymanders are controversial,” the court said, noting that an attempt to create a redistricting commission to draw new boundaries gained more than half a million signatures but was struck down by the Illinois Supreme Court in 2016 as outside the scope of the state’s constitutionally limited rules for citizen initiatives.
“These are matters for the people of Illinois to continue debating. Levers other than federal courts are available to them, whether they are state statutes, state constitutions, and even entreaties to Congress, if they wish to change the current process,” the panel said.
“Our role as federal judges is limited and does not extend to complaints about excessive partisanship in the drawing of legislative districts,” the judges wrote, noting that Democrats and Republicans adopt the practice when they are the majority party. “But the Supreme Court has declared partisan gerrymandering claims to present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.”
Gov. Pritzker urges hospitals to halt non-emergency surgeries amid record-breaking COVID-19 spike; lieutenant governor infected
3m
Omicron variant is surging. But mask rules haven’t changed. Doctors say stay the course.
42m
Business Riders have been slow to return to CTA and Metra. What will it take to get them back?
Dec 29, 2021
Politics Amid record-breaking COVID-19 spike, Illinois driver’s license facilities will temporarily close; lieutenant governor infected
30m
Horoscopes Daily horoscope for December 30, 2021
12:00 AM