(dramatic music) - Welcome to At Issue.

I'm H. Wayne Wilson.

Thank you so much as always for joining us.

In the year 2020 in Illinois races, 10 of 20 senate races were uncontested.

In that same year, there were 52 out of 118 races uncontested.

Why was that so in 2020 and why might it be so in coming elections?

We're going to discuss that with two people who've been following this very closely.

First, let me introduce to you Brad McMillan.

Brad is the co-chair of the board of CHANGE Illinois, and we'll explain CHANGE Illinois in just a moment, but, and he has his Bradley University jacket on.

So he also works at Bradley in the, the long title, - The Leadership Institute.

We'll just make it easy.

- And also with us is Madeline.

Madeline Doubek is CHANGE Illinois's executive director.

Madeline.

Thank you so much for being with us.

- My pleasure.

- And let me start and Madeline, I'd like to start with you first.

Just a little bit of history, because there have been several efforts to try to develop, and I think the generic term might be a fair map and the process for developing that kind of a map.

What is the history of that?

- Oh, well, there were several attempts in previous years to try to get a question on the ballot to voters asking if they would prefer to have an independent resident commission draw our political districts after each census.

The first effort did not collect enough signatures.

The second and third were ruled off by the State Board of Elections and the Illinois Supreme Court.

We have been a CHANGE Illinois advocating since then to try to get the legislators themselves to approve some changes, to make the process a more equitable and transparent and have come up short so far.

- And Brad, explain a little bit how the current map, the process works.

Who, who decides the map?

- Well, this last go-round because the Democrats have a super majority in both the Illinois Senate and the Illinois house, they basically drew the maps behind closed doors using their own political demographers.

And, you know, the, the process was not open and transparent.

And at the end of the day, maps were released at the 11th hour and voted on by the Illinois general assembly.

It's, it's just a horrible process and it leaves the, the citizens out of the process.

- Illinois, it happens to be Democrats who currently they're in control.

So they're drawing the maps, but this is true of Republicans in other states where the Republicans control the house and senate.

- Absolutely.

And gerrymandering depends on which state you're looking at, where the Republicans control the state.

They do a great job of gerrymandering and in the states where the Democrats control, you know, they do a great job of gerrymandering.

Other states though, like California and Arizona and Michigan have reformed their redistricting process and have turned them over to independent commissions.

So other states are getting it right.

The problem though is the, is the Democratic politicians in Illinois will justify what they did because of what the Republicans are doing in Texas.

And so it gets, gets to be this political back and forth.

- Especially in the congressional races.

- Very much so in the congressional.

- Madeline, can we talk a little bit about, Brad has mentioned gerrymandering.

Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts many, many decades ago, he carries that name.

Can we talk a little bit about gerrymandering and in particular I'd love to talk about prison gerrymandering.

- Sure, so prison gerrymandering is something people may not be very familiar with, but in essence, it's a term that's been applied to a situation in which when we conduct our census, we have a history in this country of counting incarcerated people where they are incarcerated.

And in many states, including Illinois, that tends to be in central Illinois or downstate, but for a variety of reasons, the prison population tends to be much more urban.

And so, you know, resources and representation are diverted from those urban areas to more rural and centrally located places.

And so there's been a movement across the country and gaining momentum to try to address that and fix it as a matter of equity, because most people in Illinois, when they are serving time in prison, the average prison term is under two and a half years, but they're counted at those addresses for the full decade.

- Brad, could we talk a little bit about the political gridlock that this gerrymandering creates?

- Yes.

And you know, what CHANGE Illinois has been advocating for is fair and competitive elections.

And when, where gerrymandering happens, it really pits the political parties against each other.

And, you know, under the new maps, we're going to go from five Republican congressional members to three Republican congressional members.

- You're projecting the results.

- I am, and in the state legislature, I think they've insured super majorities for their future by the way they've gerrymandered their districts.

We want fair and open and competitive elections.

And when, you know, you said this statistics early on about how a lot of these races are uncontested, well that's because people aren't going to get in the political process when they think the political process is rigged, when they don't think the districts are drawn fairly, why, why are you going to run for an office that you really don't have a fair chance at?

- I think we should show an example of the result of, and I'm going to show you the, the old map and the new map for the congressional districts in the state of Illinois.

We of course, are shrinking from 18 down to 17.

So there was a need to change the boundaries, but you can see on the left-hand side of your screen is the old one, and the new one is on the right.

And if you can't see the, the legend there, the dark red is solid Republican.

The pink color is kind of leaning Republican, dark blue and light blue would be Democratic leaning.

Brad, and then Madeline, please join into the conversation, but talk a little bit about this congressional map.

- And yes, so the thing that is very clear to me, you know, they've gone from 18 districts to 17 districts, but what they've done is they've connected the urban areas into safe Democratic districts.

So by way of example, the 17th district, which is now currently Congresswoman Bustos, that's going to include Rockford, Quad Cities, Peoria, and then come over to Bloomington-Normal.

So it's connecting the, all those, all those urban areas.

You can, you can see that's the one that's the, it's white and that is the one that is a, a, toss-up.

It doesn't lean one way or the other.

And you can see it now goes over to Bloomington-Normal.

- Yeah, - I would argue with that.

I, I, I don't think it's a toss-up.

I think it leans, leans Democratic, and I think that by connecting those urban areas, you know, they've ensured a safe democratic district.

- Let me show another example, Todd, if we could pop that map up one more time, please.

I'd appreciate it.

Going from East St. Louis on up that pink one.

I think that's connecting urban areas there.

- Yeah.

So it goes to the Champaign.

I think it connects Champaign, Decatur, Springfield, and then down to East St. Louis.

Again, and the thing that troubles me most about these maps H., is it's really dividing between urban and rural.

The Republicans are left with these expansive rural areas with no metropolitan base.

And then you have these urban areas that are, are tightly connected together.

And, you know, we already have enough division in this state.

So I think, I think these maps are just going to further divide our state between urban and rural and personally, I think it's good for either members of Congress or state legislators to represent some of both.

We're, we're not getting getting that in these maps.

- Madeline, did you wanted to add to the conversation?

- I mean, Brad is absolutely correct.

We're seeing already, not just in Illinois, but across the country, historic divisiveness and polarization in our political discussion.

And these kinds of maps are only going to exacerbate that situation for the reasons that Brad pointed out when you're, when you're drawing something that looks like a snake or a step ladder to string together urban areas, and then leave these gigantic unmanageable, large swaths of rural areas for a member of Congress to try to get around to and represent.

It just creates all kinds of problems for members of Congress to interact with their constituents and just contributes to the divisiveness and polarization, which is already creating all manner of problems for all of us.

- Let's move from the congressional maps to the state house.

And we have another map.

We're going to show you the whole state for just a moment, give you an idea.

There are 118 house seats in the state of Illinois, 59 Senate seats.

And we're going to show you central Illinois and highlight some of the districts.

For those of you out west, the gray area is the 94th district.

This is the new map, and we're just want to give you an idea of the shapes of some of these districts.

Then in the middle of that gray one, that aqua color one, the light blue one, that's the 71st district.

And then we move over to the yellow district and that's the 93rd district.

You can see how far north that goes.

And then next to that is the 73rd and Brad, that's Ryan Spain's district.

And while he's, Peoria is, a portion of Peoria is at the very southern tip of that district.

- Yeah, Representative Spain loses a lot of the city of Peoria in the new map, and many will remember he was a Peoria city council member for a very long period of time.

His district now goes straight north and actually goes to above the Quad Cities, touching the Iowa border.

So it's a drastically different district for Representative Spain moving forward.

He used to go take in a lot more of the city of Peoria and go westward.

Now he goes straight north and he has very little of the city of Peoria.

- Madeline, wasn't Ryan Spain one of the supporters of the fair map process last time around?

- He was, and he was very vocal opponent of the gerrymandering that occurred with these maps.

And, you know, I think a lot of Republicans are facing much more difficult districts and challenges as a result of what happened with these maps.

- Yeah.

And we want to, once again, if the Republicans were in power, the map would look different, but it would be the same process more or less, Brad.

- Yeah.

I mean, when, when the Republicans in Illinois had the control lovers, the power lovers, they gerrymandered as well.

It's just this go round the Democrats had super majorities in both chambers.

- Well, we'll go back to the map and show you the 105th district.

This is a district for Dan Brady, and you can see that's in that it's highlighted there, but it's in that, that light green color.

Of course, Dan is from Bloomington.

And how has that changed for us, Brad?

- Yeah, I think, I think the Bloomington-Normal area and the Peoria area, this is going to drastically change the political landscape, not only on the state level, but the congressional level, because what they did, Dan Brady lives on the outskirts of Bloomington.

And then he basically, he used to represent most of Normal and Bloomington.

He doesn't, in the new district he wouldn't represent any of that.

Now there's a new 91st house district that goes from Bloomington-Normal to East Peoria, to Bartonville where there is no incumbent.

So that's an open seat.

And then the companion to that is Jahon's district, which basically takes in most of the city of Peoria and the 46 Senate seat, which is Senator Kaylor, is the combination of those two districts.

So now Senator Kaylor is going to represent Peoria and Bloomington-Normal.

And a lot of people don't realize this.

They think of McLean County as a very Republican area.

The Bloomington-Normal itself, the heart of Bloomington-Normal is 60% Democrat.

So the fact that they've connected the heart of Bloomington-Normal with the heart of Peoria is going to create very safe Democratic districts.

- And Brand has been talking about the Senate districts.

And just so that you understand, the Senate districts represent two house districts and the easy way to figure out the number is for instance, the 91st and 92nd are in the 46th Senate district.

You just take the higher of those two numbers, the even number divided in half, and that's the Senate district number.

So 91 and 92 would be combined into half of 92, which is 46 if I recall my math.

- So I didn't even know that.

You learn something new every day.

- So Todd, if you'd go back to Johan's district, that would be the 92nd, just so we can show that.

And you can see that's basically right there in the middle of the, of the map where Peoria is, and then go to the 91st district.

And Brad, you were saying that is uncontested.

Mark Leff used to be in the 91st, but that's an uncontested, no incumbent there.

- Yeah, they, Mark was drawn out of the 91st.

So he has a new district to run in.

And, you know, my understanding is there's a Democratic McLean County board member from Normal that will be running on the Democratic side for that seat.

I'm not, I, I know of no announced Republican yet, but again, I think that the political demographics of that district, the new district lean Democratic.

- And we'll go back to the map one more time and we'll show you Tim Butler's district.

That is the 87th.

Tim is from Springfield, but his district comes up into Tazewell County, et cetera.

And that is the green district there to the southeast of Peoria.

And then the yellow district that's highlighted, that's the 88th, that's Keith Summers' district.

Keith is from Morton.

So what this gives you an idea of the shapes of these, of these particular districts.

And I want to talk a little bit about Chicago.

We're not going to show you a map of the city of Chicago, but there is a situation up there that the Chicago city council is divided into 50 wards.

And Madeline, could you give us an update on the efforts because CHANGE Illinois has been putting together in, I believe it's called the people's choice map as an alternative.

Can you give us an update on that effort?

- Sure, so we created a Chicago advisory redistricting commission with the help of an independent selection committee.

Announced that we were doing this well over a year ago and opened up invitation to apply to anyone who was of voting age in the city of Chicago, got more than 430 applicants.

And this committee reviewed those applicants and interviewed 50 of them, chose 13 commissioners and some alternates.

And those people were trained by legal and demographic experts and held hearings over four months over the summer from June, July, August, and September.

Released several drafts of proposed maps for the city of Chicago, collected more feedback from the public.

Everything the commission did was live-streamed.

Translation services were available.

Every meeting was held either at night or on weekends so that people could participate outside of normal working hours and they crafted and drafted what we call the people's map.

The interesting thing is that in state law, if 10 members of the 50-member Chicago city council support this map and introduce it into the council now, then a referendum would be triggered.

And that would put this question before voters and voters could choose from among however many maps receive the support of at least 10 members of the city council.

Now they had, the council had until December 1st to vote, they did not vote.

They could not get to 41 votes, which is what would have blocked a referendum from occurring.

They still can try to get to 41 until May 20th, 40 days before the next election, which will be in the end of June next year.

But this people's map and some other maps that are out there are still in play and have a chance of getting before voters so that voters could have a say in what their ward maps and political representation and communities look like in the city of Chicago.

- I want to talk more about that Madeline, but first Brad, we want to make sure that people understand.

Madeline made reference to the next election.

The primary being in June, many people are used to the fact that it's, what are you talking about?

June primary in June for Illinois?

- This is actually one of the few things in my view that the Illinois general assembly did right.

Because the census data was delayed.

And because the map situation was so complicated this year, they needed to move the primary to June to give candidates a time to adjust to the new districts.

The state maps are still in court litigation right now.

So there's a chance that that may even change.

So normally you would file petitions early December.

- For a March primary.

- March primary, but that whole timetable has been changed.

- Madeline, back to Chicago.

I'd like you to talk about the, the Englewood neighborhood that's on the south side of Chicago, and that in the past has been divided up into many different wards.

And, and could you explain why that's so important in terms of representation?

- Yeah, so one of the, one of the very top principles that this commission that we created adopted for itself was to try to keep communities together as much as possible.

Now Chicago has 77 neighborhoods, but only 50 wards.

So it's not always possible to keep a community whole, but based on input from the public, they tried very hard to do that, especially for the neighborhood of Englewood because it, and a lot of other communities, particularly on the south and west sides of the city have historically been split and splintered by incumbent council members.

And when that happens, it makes it very difficult for people in those neighborhoods to know who their representative is, how to contact them, how to get organized and get help.

Englewood happens to be a neighborhood that is experiencing a lot of gun violence.

It's historically been the case.

There are a lot of terrific people in Englewood, who we heard from during the hearing process for the commission who asked for their community to be kept whole in one ward or two at the very most.

And this people's commission did just that and responded to those concerns.

You know, when you have a community split up six or seven different ways, there's no one person who really can be held accountable and responsible when that community doesn't get the attention and the resources it needs.

- That's the Chicago council.

I want to talk about the legislature again, the house seats in the legislature and to the southwest of Chicago, the southwest suburbs, there is a growing group of Arabs, Palestinians, et cetera.

And here's another example of them being divided up into quite a few different house districts.

- Yes.

And, and some of our partners, we, we have something we call the Illinois Redistricting Collaborative and the Illinois Muslim Civic Coalition is one of our partners and various people from that group showed up at nearly every one of dozens and dozens of hearings on these state maps and advocated strongly to be kept together.

And they just were rebuffed and ignored by these mapmakers.

And, and so now they are split up and they can't really have an effect on the outcome of the election.

And it's going to be very difficult for them to elect someone that they would like to see in office.

- Brad, I'd like to finish up the conversation, at least on air conversation, discussing the status of lawsuits.

What's the status of the maps that we've shown.

And there are several lawsuits.

- Yes, so a, a Latino group and the Republican caucus filed a federal lawsuit, challenging the state map because originally the state map was drawn before the census data was released and it undercounted the Latino population in Illinois by 150,000.

So this is actually being argued in court this week at, at the federal level.

The federal court asked that both parties present alternative maps.

So the, so the court is hearing oral arguments and looking at these different maps.

And we anticipate a decision by the end of this year.

- So the maps that we've been showing could change depending on what the federal court decides.

- Possibly there could, could be a redrawing of the maps, possibly.

- The state, the state maps could be redrawn.

Those, the lawsuit is focused on the state Senate and state house maps, not the congressional maps.

And there, there also was a third late party, which joined the suit and contested some, the ways the districts were drawn in the East St. Louis area by the NAACP.

- Okay.

And with that, we are out of time.

We hope the conversation continues in your home.

Let me say thank you to Madeline Doubek, who is the executive director of CHANGE Illinois.

Thank you so much as always for being on At Issue and to Brad McMillan, principle leadership at Bradley University and the co-chair of the board of CHANGE Illinois.

Brad.

Thank you.

- Thanks H. - We'll be back next time with a conversation on At Issue about immigration in central Illinois.

Please join us then.

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