Illinois legislative districts: 
The jigsaw puzzle

Before video games, kids often worked on jigsaw puzzles. And the older the kids got, the more complicated the puzzles were — the pieces became more oddly shaped, with devious little in-and-out cuts to make things even more confusing, especially when the pieces got broken. There was always great satisfaction, however, upon finishing a particularly tricky puzzle.

We in Illinois will soon be faced with a similar task. Every 10 years, following the U.S. Census, the state is required to redraw its legislative and congressional boundaries.

That task falls to the elected members of the Illinois legislature. If the two political parties can’t agree on a map, then the name of one party is literally drawn out of a hat to do the job, and that party alone gets to determine the voting boundaries in the state for an entire decade. It should be no surprise that Illinois is the only state in the U.S. to employ such a process.

If you look at the current map of voting districts, you can see how they’ve been manipulated by the political parties over the years, so that incumbents build “safe zones” to the tune of a 98 percent re-election rate since 2000. Districts slither all over, sometimes covering hundreds of square miles, yet stretching only a block wide in some places. It’s the hardest jigsaw puzzle you can possibly imagine.

The pieces all look like they’re broken, which makes it look like the only goal of the people drawing the maps is to preserve their own seats and their own power. And that’s an injustice to the hard-working and dedicated public servants that do good work on behalf of Illinois citizens. Not only does it make people not want to vote, it makes good people disenfranchised with the laws and programs of the state.

However, there is a movement under way to bring the way districts are drawn back to the people, and away from the politicians. The Illinois Fair Map Coalition is circulating petitions to change the redistricting laws, so that an independent commission — and not incumbent politicians — would redraw the maps.