Drawing Better Maps
Politicians shouldn't pick their voters.
Let’s talk about maps.
More specifically, let’s talk about how we decide on the map that divides Chicago into 50 wards. This might seem like a weird place to begin a newsletter about public policy in Chicago (don’t we have bigger issues going on?), but it’s the right one.
Process Issues Matter
If you want to examine how a city is working, it’s not enough to look at the policies they have in place. It’s also important to look at how those policies got there. How do laws or regulations get passed? How do politicians get elected? Which citizens get heard and which ones get ignored? These questions aren’t as sexy, but they’re foundational to how our government works. Everything else is downstream.
Chicago’s Maps
With that understood, let’s now talk about maps. Once a decade, Chicago redraws the borders to its fifty wards, as we do for Congress or the state legislature. This is typically a pretty insider-y job. Aldermen get together, decide where they want the boundaries of their wards to be, and then pass that map once they’re happy. By state law, any proposed map requires 41 votes in city council to get enacted, but traditionally this has not been a huge challenge.
As you might imagine, this is not always great for the public at large. Sometimes politicians take it as an opportunity to remove their opponents from power, or use it to potential challengers as future threats. But it also means the maps don’t reflect logical boundaries or group communities together. Our current map, for example, divides the neighborhood of Englewood into six different wards. Carving up a neighborhood like that is bad. It makes it harder for residents to know who represents them, and means no one alderman is accountable for that neighborhood's interests.
A better process
It’s not hard to imagine doing this a better way by having an independent group do it. This is not a novel idea. This is how it’s done in many other places, like Michigan and Iowa. Virtually every time someone runs for citywide or statewide office in Illinois as a reform-minded candidate, they claim to support that idea. Lori Lightfoot endorsed the idea of independent maps for ward redistricting in 2019. JB Pritzker endorsed the idea of independent maps for statewide redistricting in 2018, and Bruce Rauner did the same. Yet despite this, nobody ever does anything about it, political insiders have their way and nothing changes.
Over the past year, however, a coalition of reform groups led by CHANGE Illinois (a nonprofit focused on good government issues) assembled an independent commission of their own and produced a map. It was called ‘The People’s Map,’ and it was a pretty good one! You can see their original map here. Ward lines looked surprisingly straightforward, without the jagged boundaries of gerrymandering that we usually end up with. Neighborhoods were kept together (Englewood). And it had good racial diversity, with 15 majority black wards, 14 majority Latino wards, 13 majority white wards, 7 majority-minority wards, and the first majority Asian ward (around Chinatown). It was endorsed by a wide variety of civic-minded organizations in Chicago, including the League of Women Voters, Reform for Illinois, IVI-IPO, and the Rainbow/PUSH coalition. The Chicago Tribune also endorsed it as a better alternative to the typical insider-driven process last fall.
Normally, this would all amount to little more than a nice showcase of how bad our politicians are without achieving anything else. In this particular instance, however, that’s not necessarily the case - because city council can’t agree on what map they should go with. The Black and Latino caucuses (both of which are large enough to block any map they don’t support) have been unable to agree on the correct number of majority black and majority Latino wards, given population shifts in the city over the past decade, and this disagreement has resulted in neither map receiving enough support to pass the council as of yet. As a result, it seems a near certainty that the redistricting map question will go to a referendum this June, where Chicagoans will actually get to choose which map is used.
While CHANGE Illinois was unable to get sufficient traction to put their map on the ballot, in February they partnered with City Council’s Latino Caucus to produce a combined map they referred to as The People’s Coalition Map, which retains the bulk of the benefits provided by the People’s Map in the first place. In addition to the support of the Latino Caucus, the map also has the support of the Black chambers of commerce for Illinois and Cook County.
Unfortunately, however, the other 34 members of City Council remain opposed to this partnership map, and thus far have prevented the Latino Caucus from updating their official proposal to reflect the new People’s Coalition Map. This is wrong. Chicagoans deserve a chance to vote on a good map, and the People’s Coalition Map is better than either the original map put out by the Latino Caucus or that put forth by the Rules Committee.
May 19th is the deadline for City Council to agree on a map without the issue to proceed to a citywide referendum on June 28th, and Change Illinois has indicated that without their amendments to the Latino Caucus’s original map they’ll likely be resigned to informing residents, rather than supporting either proposal. I can’t say I agree - Looking at the three maps side by side, the Rules Committee map strikes me as starkly different, with messier lines and less compact wards than either of the Latino Caucus-related proposals. I would have hoped the People’s Map had a chance on the ballot, and I still hope the People’s Coalition Map has a chance, but if it doesn’t, you should vote for the Latino Caucus’s Coalition Map.
No, Really, Process Issues Matter
I know I said this at the beginning, but it bears repeating: process issues like the maps that define electoral boundaries matter. Without a good electoral process, our politicians don’t have to worry about getting reelected and aren’t accountable to anyone. That’s bad for the public and bad for the city. With a good process, in contrast, you get more competitive elections and politicians that are accountable to the public that elects them. Sometimes that means you get different, less entrenched politicians - but election reform also improves the behavior of the same officials, since they know they’ll be held accountable to the right constituencies. To put it plainly:
Better election processes lead to better elections
Better elections lead to better politicians
Better politicians lead to better policies
Better policies lead to better results
The Bottom Line
My goal for A City That Works is to define actionable ideas and policies that we should be enacting to make Chicago work better. To do that, I’m hoping to wrap up each post with some actual definitive recommendations on what to do better. In this instance:
Chicago should enact real redistricting reform going forward. Ward boundaries shouldn’t be drawn by the City Council.
For our current redistricting, the People’s Coalition Map is a good map. In a referendum, people should vote for this map. If it doesn’t make the ballot, the Latino Caucus’s Coalition Map is a better proposal and deserves your vote.