SPRINGFIELD — Hours after a U.S. Supreme Court majority ruled a Louisiana voting map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, Illinois Senate President Don Harmon announced Wednesday that a state constitutional amendment to enshrine protections for majority-minority districts will not appear on Illinois’ November ballot.
Harmon said in a statement that he wanted legal experts to review the Supreme Court’s ruling before the Illinois General Assembly moved forward with the proposed constitutional amendment. He added that he expects the amendment to be revisited in a future legislative session.
“Illinois will not go back. We will not look the other way and call it equity. We will dissect this decision, find a path forward and continue to protect the rights of all Illinoisans,” Harmon, a Democrat, said in a press release. “I would ask for patience and time for our state’s top legal experts to work through this. The last thing we want is to act in haste and risk unintended consequences down the road. Too much is at stake for too many.”
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority voted 6-3 that Louisiana’s second Black-majority district was too heavily reliant on race. The ruling gives an opening to other Republican states to eliminate Black- and Latino-majority districts that typically vote more Democratic.
The ruling was slammed by Democrats across the nation and by the three more liberal justices on the high court, who rejected the conservative majority’s characterization that its decision upheld the Voting Rights Act rather than gutted it.
Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker described the ruling as an “abomination” and an attack on a “crown jewel of our democracy.”
“We’re not going to stand for it in Illinois. We’re going to push back, we have options for pushing back. And that is under discussion with the legislature,” Pritzker said, speaking after an unrelated event at Olive-Harvey College. He didn’t elaborate on those options, and a spokesperson declined to provide further details later Wednesday.
Despite the ruling, Pritzker said he thinks Illinois’ maps were constitutional.
“I’m sure there will be people who try to attack it, but the reality is that if you read through the Supreme Court decision, I’m told that it validates the maps that are already in place, and of course, we’ll be looking at a new remap in Illinois in 2031,” he said.
Unlike the Supreme Court’s decision, which centered on a U.S. House district in Louisiana, the proposed Illinois constitutional amendment concerned state legislative district maps. The proposal passed the Illinois House on April 22 in a 74-38 vote along party lines and was before the Senate on Wednesday when the high court’s decision came down and Harmon pulled it from consideration. Had it passed, voters would have voted in November whether to enshrine protections for majority-minority districts in the state constitution.
The measure called for amending the constitution by requiring, in order of priority, that Illinois legislative districts be equal in population; provide equal opportunity regardless of race; have districts with racial minority influence; be contiguous and be compact. Currently, the Illinois constitution only requires districts to be contiguous, compact and equal in population, with none being more important than the other.
Beyond the repeal of significant portions of the Voting Rights Act, the amendment push comes one year after state Republicans unsuccessfully sued to challenge the state General Assembly map. The Illinois Supreme Court’s Democratic majority wrote in April 2025 that the plaintiffs waited too long to contest the maps drawn in 2021, but did not address arguments of unconstitutional gerrymandering.
Senate Republican Leader John Curran of Downers Grove said moving forward on the amendment would have been a step backward but that Illinois’ current maps remain an issue.
“We still have a gerrymandering problem in Illinois. Voters are being disenfranchised by the hyper-partisan mapmaking process that Democrats continue to employ every 10 years,” Curran said. “My hope is we will continue as Republicans to advocate for fair maps here in Illinois and return power back to the voters of the state.”
In getting the amendment question passed through the House, Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, the measure’s House sponsor, said Illinois’ map should reflect the state’s diversity.
“Gutting the Federal Voting Rights Act would be detrimental to how maps are drawn to create a legislature that looks like this state,” Welch said. “The people of Illinois deserve a legislature that looks like them. They deserve Blacks, Latinos, Asians, Koreans, Vietnamese. They deserve Muslims in the legislature, women leaders.”
Chicago Democratic Sen. Mike Simmons said the high court’s ruling was a devastating blow to voting rights.
“I honestly fell out of my chair this morning when I read this,” Simmons said. “Really conservative red states that are making it such that Black people in places like Louisiana and Mississippi, where some of my ancestors fled to Chicago from, are now 100 years back in the past, where in five years, there may not be Black districts from these states.”
