The Englewood neighborhood on the South Side suffers from decades of violent crime, disinvestment and joblessness. It also has no single alderman it can turn to for help. Gerrymandering fractured the neighborhood into six City Council wards. When your odds are 1 in 6 that you’ll call the right ward office to get an Englewood concern addressed, the likeliest outcome is that you’ll heave a sigh and not bother calling at all.
There are countless other examples of wards twisted into nonsensical polygons for the benefit of clout-hungry aldermen interested only in gaming the system to amass more votes — and more power. Take the 2nd Ward. Its shape could be mistaken for a lobster created by a bad Minecraft player. Its boundaries add up to more than 125 sides. Think about that, 125 sides to a single ward.
The 2nd Ward’s alderman, Brian Hopkins, realizes the folly of the gerrymandered ward, and so do his constituents. He recently told us that when he first ran for the seat in 2015, he noticed “how angry people were. They looked at the shape of the 2nd Ward and what they saw was an ink blot test. They saw corruption. They saw lack of transparency. They didn’t know how exactly it happened, but they knew it was wrong, and they knew their voices were marginalized in that process.”
Hopkins wants the way Chicago draws its ward maps every 10 years reformed, and so do we. We’ll talk about long-term solutions later, but first, the city has a more pressing dilemma in need of immediate resolution.
The City Council has yet to agree on a ward remap that, in theory, is supposed to hew to shifts in population and demographics shown in decennial U.S. census data. In reality, it’s been the same self-serving power grab that aldermen engage in every 10 years when ward boundaries get redrawn. The council’s Black and Latino caucuses each have crafted their own ward maps, and for months they’ve been squabbling without reaching a compromise.
Unless both sides can reach an agreement before May 19, voters will get to decide in a June 28 referendum which map will become the city’s new ward boundaries — the one proposed by the Black caucus or the offer from the Latino caucus. A remap needs 41 votes to become law, and neither side likely has enough votes. We have always thought that letting voters decide is the best route to take, especially since Chicagoans are the one group routinely shut out of the remap process.
There’s a hitch, however, to the potential for a referendum.
Both the Black and Latino caucuses have submitted their versions of a remap for placement on the June 28 referendum ballot. But the Latino caucus now wants to submit a new and improved map for the ballot. The caucus has teamed up with Change Illinois, a civic advocacy group behind an advisory redistricting commission that crafted its own map. That document, known as the “People’s Map,” has merit because it was produced with the input of voters — the same voters that City Hall has ignored during remap talks.Like Change Illinois, members of the Latino caucus believe the process is fairer when it includes citizen input.
But 15 aldermen with the Latino caucus already signed onto putting their original map on the referendum ballot. The Black caucus map has been signed by 33 aldermen. Aldermen can only sign onto one map. A minimum of 10 aldermen are needed to put a map on the ballot, which makes it impossible for the Latino caucus to swap out its old map for a new “People’s Map.”
Change Illinois leaders tell us there is a wonky workaround, though. If at least 26 of the council’s 50 aldermen vote to approve one of the maps, then the whole process starts anew and each caucus can revamp their maps and resubmit them for placement on the ballot. A vote of 41 or more for a map would negate the need for a referendum, but given how far apart both sides have been, that’s not likely.
For the sake of getting on the ballot a proposed map that gives Chicagoans a meaningful say in the process, we think that’s the course the council should take. Change Illinois Executive Director Madeleine Doubek tells us their map does the best job at keeping neighborhoods whole.
Why is that important? Think Englewood.
“It has been the minority communities on the South and West sides that have been splintered up,” Doubek tells us. “Englewood has pieces of six different wards. It makes it impossible for people who are trying to make life better in Englewood.”
Change Illinois leaders aren’t optimistic about the likelihood of getting on the ballot the map that they and the Latino caucus prefer. They might feel better about their chances if Mayor Lori Lightfoot pushed for a council vote on one of the maps before the May 19 deadline, and the mayor should do exactly that. After all, it was Lightfoot who, during the mayoral campaign, pledged to back independent redistricting.
Regardless of how this year’s remap shakes out, it’s abundantly clear that Chicago shouldn’t have to go through any backroom, scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours remapping again. It should be the citizenry of Chicago — and not business-as-usual politics — that anchors the remap process.
It’s past time for Chicago to work with the General Assembly to enact legislation that puts the city’s decennial remapping in the hands of an independent citizens’ commission. And if it’s good for Chicago, it should be good for Illinois. For years we have advocated putting on the ballot a referendum asking voters to approve a state constitutional amendment that overhauls redistricting in the state.
If aldermen and politicians across the state would stop and think, they’d realize that there’s a big incentive to taking politics out of remaps. It would mark a strong step toward rebuilding citizen trust in government, from the ward level to the General Assembly. Right now, that trust simply isn’t there.
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