Yesterday we wrote about a Springfield constitutional amendment push for a tax on millionaires dressed up under the guise of property tax relief and boosted school funding. Thankfully, it appears that amendment is going nowhere this session.
Now, lawmakers are advancing another constitutional amendment — this one targeting how Illinois draws its political maps. And no, it won’t get us the fair maps voters so richly deserve.
Here’s what’s on the table.
House Speaker Chris Welch on Monday filed a proposal — House Joint Resolution Constitutional Amendment 28 — that amends political mapmaking rules by creating a ranked list of five criteria to be followed.
First, legislative districts must be substantially equal in population. This already is required by the Illinois Constitution. Second, districts must be drawn to ensure “equal opportunity” to participate in the political process regardless of race. Third, districts must be drawn, where practical, to create racial coalition or influence districts. (The phrase “where practical” seems open to interpretation.) And coming in as the lowest priorities, districts should be contiguous and compact — “to the extent practicable.” That major hedge is new, and seriously waters down the importance of these two existing constitutional criteria.
This redistricting amendment advanced to the Senate on Wednesday after clearing the House on a 74-38 vote. To reach voters this November, it would still need Senate approval by May 3. If it passes, HJRCA 28 will end up on the ballot, where voters will be asked to weigh in.
Welch has positioned these changes as necessary to combat potential changes to the Voting Rights Act, amid ongoing legal uncertainty over how courts will treat race-conscious redistricting. Illinois isn’t the only blue state gearing up for this possibility — California is currently advancing changes to its California Voting Rights Act, too. Notably, California has a very different mapmaking system, using an independent commission to draw maps, unlike Illinois, where politicians get to pick their voters.
Illinois Democrats say they’re fighting to protect us from President Donald Trump and the Supreme Court, but who will protect us from Illinois Democrats?
Illinois voters already face electoral unfairness driven by extreme gerrymandering, a problem this amendment does nothing to fix, and may quietly reinforce when Democrats draw legislative maps after the 2030 census.
If you want to understand how the map affects election outcomes, consider that despite Illinois House Republicans winning 45% of the statewide vote in 2024, there were precisely zero seat changes, and Democrats held onto a 78-40 Democratic supermajority.
Research shows that having more candidates on the ballot leads to higher voter participation. The converse is also true.
Today, the constitution requires that districts must be “compact, contiguous and substantially equal in population,” meaning districts should be geographically coherent rather than sprawling across multiple, disconnected communities. The existing rules are hardly followed faithfully. Indeed, many of Illinois’ electoral districts are far from compact, spanning multiple towns and counties in an array of tortured, irregular shapes. We marveled at them during our endorsement process.
This is evidence of a system where electoral outcomes are largely insulated from shifts in voter sentiment. Gerrymandering reduces electoral competition, entrenches incumbents and marginalizes whole communities, ultimately eroding public trust in democracy. In 2024, nearly half of Illinois House races were uncontested. It’s hard to get good candidates to run an uphill battle, as Illinois Republicans know all too well. Democrats know it too, and that’s yet another reason for them to cling to the existing order.
State Rep. Ryan Spain, R-Peoria, likened this proposal to someone caught playing with a corked bat in a baseball game, adding that Democrats know their monopoly mapmaking is at risk after multiple challenges in court.
“They’ve been caught cheating and they want to change the rules of the game to disenfranchise voters,” he said in a phone interview Tuesday. That’s a strong statement, but his underlying point — that lawmakers are protecting their own power — hits the mark.
We met last year with Spain, House Minority Leader Tony McCombie and Dan Ugaste, R-Geneva, who championed a maps lawsuit filed in January asking the Illinois Supreme Court to declare the map unconstitutional and appoint an independent official to draw a new one. The court refused to hear the case, not based on merit but because it said Republicans had waited too long to file the challenge. The maps stayed in place, and the court never addressed whether they were actually unfair.
We wish they had. It’d be hard to view these political maps as anything but wildly unfair.
Leading another fair maps effort was a bipartisan duo: political veterans Ray LaHood and Bill Daley, who met with us last September. They proposed taking redistricting out of lawmakers’ hands by creating a bipartisan commission, made up of nonpoliticians and a small number of legislators, to draw Illinois’ state legislative maps, with safeguards to prevent partisan manipulation. If the commission deadlocked, a structured tie-breaking process would resolve disputes, all as part of a proposed constitutional amendment to be put before voters. Alas, that effort ultimately was abandoned.
Despite Gov. JB Pritzker’s promising in 2018 on the campaign trail to veto gerrymandered maps, it’s proven impossible so far to shake them, and after President Trump’s reelection, focus on maps has shifted away from fairness and toward congressional power. After conservative states such as Texas redrew congressional maps to give Republicans an edge, blue states have done the same, most recently with Virginia voters approving — and a court quickly blocking — a measure that would temporarily hand map-drawing power back to lawmakers and is expected to give Democrats an edge, part of the escalating redistricting arms race between the parties.
Yet as the focus remains on federal politics, our state legislative maps and the unfairness of them cannot be a mere afterthought. Legislative maps are vitally important to Illinois democracy. State legislative maps have a direct impact on who ends up writing Illinois laws and controlling the state budget.
These are the folks who decide things like the Bears bill, the tax on millionaires and pension reform (or a lack thereof), all of which show up in the taxes you pay every day. These elected officials have an outsized impact on our lives.
We’ve long argued that the best fix is to take mapmaking out of politicians’ hands. We strongly supported Daley and LaHood’s idea of creating a bipartisan, independent commission to draw the state’s political maps, a model similar to those in Arizona, Colorado and Michigan.
Adopting HJRCA 28 would be a move further away from independent, fair maps, doubling down on our harmful politician-driven model. If this proposal makes it onto the November ballot, voters must turn it down and demand real, lasting reform.
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