By Peter Hancock
Attorneys for the General Assembly’s Democratic Party leaders filed documents in federal court Wednesday last week to deny that newly- drawn State legislative district maps amount to racial gerrymandering, instead accusing the plaintiffs in the three lawsuits of trying to use race to redraw districts for their own purposes.
The filings are the Democrats’ response to proposed changes in the district maps submitted last week by Republican Party leaders, a Latino advocacy group in Chicago and black civil rights groups in the Metro East region.
A three-judge federal court panel in Chicago is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the three separate cases starting Tuesday, Dec. 7.
The new maps will determine how communities across the state are represented in the General Assembly in Springfield for the next 10 years.
Due in large part to the pandemic, the U.S. Census Bureau did not release official, detailed, numbers from the 2020 census until mid-August. Lawmakers then called a special session to adjust the initial maps they had approved in the Spring, maps that were based on population estimates from survey data, and passed a new set of maps August 31. Pritzker signed them into law September 24.
Among other things, the census numbers showed Illinois had lost population overall since the 2010 census. But there had been a substantial increase in the State’s Latino population while black and white populations both declined.
In separate suits, Republican leaders and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or MALDEF, both argued that despite the growth in the Latino population, the new maps actually reduce the number of districts in which Latinos make up a majority, or a large plurality, of the voting age population. They argued that violates both the U.S. Constitution and the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965.
In their court filing Wednesday, however, lawyers for the Democratic leaders denied any constitutional or legal violation.
“The September Redistricting Plan protects minority voting strength and provides Hispanic and black voters more than an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice,” their brief states. “The three plaintiffs have failed to provide evidence to support otherwise and have not demonstrated that the September Redistricting Plan violates the Voting Rights Act or the U.S. Constitution.”
Earlier in November, the three sets of plaintiffs submitted their proposed revisions to the maps. MALDEF proposed changes in the Chicago area that would create 10 largely-Latino districts in the Chicago area, while Republicans proposed creating an 11th Latino district in Aurora.
In their response Wednesday, however, the Democratic leaders argue that none of those proposals overlap with each other and that each would have ripple effects that would affect neighboring districts that have not been contested.
The Republican proposal, Democrats argue, “purports to fix a racial gerrymander on the northwest side of Chicago by itself racially gerrymandering Latinos in and out of districts and politically gerrymandering throughout the region.”
Further, they argue, the GOP plan “moves population in and out of neighboring districts to benefit the Republican incumbent in (House District) 20 (Rep. Bradley Stephens) and give the Republicans a better opportunity to win HD 48 and HD 56.”
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service covering state government and distributed to more than 400 newspapers statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
— Capitol News Illinois