BY MICHAEL KASPER
Redistricting – the process of redrawing Congressional and legislative districts after each census to ensure equal representation—is full of political consequences. Which citizens are grouped together in a district helps determine the political leanings of representatives elected from that area, which in turn helps determine the partisan balance of Congress and the state legislature. That is why the Supreme Court has called redistricting an “inherently” political process.
After the 1990 census, awareness of political demographics led to the creation of Illinois’ first majority Latino Congressional district. Continued attention to political data has sustained this district over the past two decades despite population shifts, changing demographics, and gentrification.
After the most recent census, Chicago lost about 200,000 in African-American population. Awareness that much of this population moved to the southern suburbs allowed the state to redraw legislative districts to follow this movement with no reduction in majority African-American districts. Political data permitted the creation of African-American and Latino “influence” districts in Springfield/Decatur and Aurora—the first deliberate minority voting empowerment in these areas. Awareness of these consequences produces political empowerment that ought to be celebrated, not condemned.
In recent years, there have been proposals suggesting that Illinois ought to turn a deliberately blind eye to these political consequences and, instead, implement a “non-political” system with districts drawn by a computer, like Iowa’s. Keep in mind that Iowa has sufficient minority population to support exactly zero minority districts: no African-American districts and no Latino districts. It’s easy to be colorblind when everyone is the same color. In a state as ethnically and culturally diverse as ours, a colorblind system could do nothing but hurt minority representation.
Others have proposed replacing the current system—in which districts are enacted by our elected representatives—with a system allowing appointed “experts” to draw the districts. That would remove the only real check that we have on our government—the power of the ballot—by putting this function in the hands of people with no accountability to the voters. Be suspicious of anyone who says, “I’m going to empower you by taking away your power.”
Today, redistricting is in the hands of elected officials. If we don’t like their product, we can vote them out of office. The word for that is democracy. And, as Winston Churchill famously said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”
Michael Kasper is a Chicago lawyer who practices in the area of voting rights and redistricting. This opinion piece was originally posted by the Chicago Sun-Times on April 5.